[bksvol-discuss] Re: pages that won't scan right.
- From: Monica Willyard <rhyami@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:33:09 -0400
Hi, Jim. I know you've been scanning with Kurzweil for awhile, so
if I cover something obvious, you can mentally discard
it. (smile) I gave you my idea of what might have caused the page
problem with your book, but I decided to paste that paragraph into
this email too because it might help somebody else who is having the
same problem. After that I'm including some ideas for preventing
garbled pages in the future. First, as to the garbled pages, when I
encounter one either while scanning or validating, I type qqq at the
top of the page. You could use another letter though. The point is
to have something unique that you can do a search for later. I have
done this with Death On The Flop so I can quickly locate and paste
pages into it when you've scanned them.
I have a hunch about what went wrong with this book. This applies to
both Openbook and Kurzweil. Do you ever notice that during a scan
that your scanner will make a sort of stuttering sound, almost like
it's recalibrating itself and that that specific page takes a little
longer to scan? My scanner does this maybe once every 70 pages or
so. When it does this, I've noticed that the page it scans ends up
being totally garbled. In fact, when I hear that sort of stuttery
sound, I pick up the book and let the scanner do it's thing. That
results in a blank page that I can easily remove. Then I put the
book back on the glass and keep moving along. I learned this by
trial and error because it's one of those little things that isn't
written down anywhere.
As for preventing garbled pages, I do a few things to prevent
it. First, under the settings menu in Kurzweil, I go to general
settings and change the threshold setting to 98.5. I also turn on
the ignore suspicious region option in the recognition settings to
prevent stray characters like the ones in your scan of Death On The
Flop. I hit ok and save this in my default settings file. Then
you're good to go for future scans. What this does is lets you know
if a page has scanned poorly, at less than 98.5 percent
accuracy. The minute I hear that a page has scanned at 96 or 97
percent, I stop scanning and go to take a look at the offending
page. Sometimes it's fine with just a few messed up words. But
sometimes it's a garbled page, and I'm still near the right place in
the print book, so fixing it is easier.
Next, before I scan, I turn to a page well into the book and use the
optimize scan feature of Kurzweil. It usually does a good job of
adjusting the brightness setting and such. That starts things off on
the right foot.
The other thing I do once a book is scanned and before I submit it is
to run the rank spelling tool under the tools menu. If it finds some
really strange errors, or if it says my book is at only 96 or 97
percent accuracy, I know there's a good chance there is at least one
badly garbled page. I play detective and go hunting for that page,
using the page down key and read a bit from the top of each page till
I find it.
I hope I've written something here that can be useful to someone. No
one knows how to get a good scan until they've experimented and asked
questions. If each of us teaches someone else, we make Bookshare a
better place and improve the quality of the books in the
collection. So if anything I've written here isn't clear or is
wrong, please speak up. (smile)
Monica Willyard, rhyami@xxxxxxxxx
Add rhyami to your Skype if you'd like to chat.
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