The Job:- We have a 350 page book that we need to scan for republication / re-printing.- Once scanned the images will be "pasted" into either Microsoft Word or into Corel Draw X3... then PDF'd and sent to the printer to print a thousand or more copies of the book.
The Status:- It is all black & white book with about about 200 photos.- We are scanning on a Brother MFC 9700 Multi-Function Laser Printer/Scanner using the Microsoft Scanner & Camera Wizzard. - We do not have Corel on the machine with the Scanner- For the text we have been experimenting with different dpi settings (300 & 600) & different file formats (JPG, PNG, TIFF) (600 dpi looks best)
The Plan:- is to scan the book first for text... - then re-scan the pages with photo's... using different settings... if necessary.- Once scanned each page will have to be cropped in Corel Photo Paint (on another machine) and then resaved.- Then later imported or pasted into either Microsoft Word or Corel Draw X-3 (on another machine)
The Questions:1 - What is the best file format to save the scanned images? (This will be our Master Copy).. JPG seems to make the B&W files very big !?.. To maximize quality maybe PNG or TIFF?.. What do you guys suggest?2 - Once cropped in Photo Paint X3 - What format should we save them in?(Remember they will be later imported or repasted into either Corel Draw X3 or Word)
Thanks for any help on this.
Black and White is not the same than "Grayscale". Two colors or 256 colors, but also a great difference of quality. Since I think you will use all grayscale photos, the best way is to use all as TIF (for printing purposes) . If it was for web, you can use JPG or PNG
Ariel just answered you about the format; I will just add something about size: it's not clear to me if after the scan you are going to do OCR (for automatic character recognition), which will then be used as normal text or if you are trying to vectorise letter shapes. For the latter, for better results, you should perform a scan as big as your computer and scanning devices permit.
Mosh said: Ariel just answered you about the format; I will just add something about size: it's not clear to me if after the scan you are going to do OCR (for automatic character recognition), which will then be used as normal text or if you are trying to vectorise letter shapes. For the latter, for better results, you should perform a scan as big as your computer and scanning devices permit.
I agree with Mosh, Optical Character Recognition is the way to go, with as much text as you have to scan. The photos can be scanned as either TIF or JPG, which ever suits your pleasure, into Corel PhotoPaint for any touchup, cropping, tone adjustment, etc.
Corel Graphics Suite can not convert the text images into text characters, most word processors can not, either. Thus, using OCR to convert the scans to text allows you the ability to use your favorite publishing software for the text (and text formatting) and for the image placement (after the images have been cleaned up).
Thanks for the help everyone.
We are not attempting to OCR this book right now. It is a poorly printed original and even under the best of conditions will require complete re-reading which almost always leads to re-edting which almost leads to hours &/or days of discussion of what should be changed and why since we not have an editable document :)
And if we forgo the editing & associated discussions & just OCR it and then send it to the printer... well even if the OCR misses one character out of a thousand... it makes us look bad.
And, once we have a "text" file then we have to completely relay out the book... which leads to even more head-banging discussions... and project time.
Simply doing an optical scan and reprint with a statement in the front... This is an unedited scan of the original book" will save us a lot of heart ache :)
We may OCR it next year... depending on demand.
Thanks for the help however... we ar proceeding with tif files as you guys suggested.
Mel_3 said:We are scanning on a Brother MFC 9700 Multi-Function Laser Printer/Scanner using the Microsoft Scanner & Camera Wizzard.
heh, I have same unit, someone gave it to me for free recently
Mel_3 said:plan is to scan the book first for text... then re-scan the pages with photo's... using different settings... if necessary.
I'd scan the whole page at once. if the original print is in rough condition anyway, 300 DPI & greyscale is fine.
Mel_3 said: Once scanned each page will have to be cropped in Corel Photo Paint (on another machine) and then resaved.
You can crop bitmaps very quickly inside Draw directly with the new X3 crop tool.
Mel_3 said:Once cropped in Photo Paint X3 - What format should we save them in?
I tried a test: but it wasn't a book. I scanned 3 pages using Microsoft Scanner and it made a multi-page tiff. Now... to tease you, in X5, I was able to bring multi-page tiff into DRAW, then ungroup it into 3 separate files.