[bksvol-discuss] text quality
- From: "Kellie Hartmann" <kellhart@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 00:04:17 -0500
Hi all.
Even with the wonderful new scanning software available there are a few
kinds of things that are very difficult to get a good scan from. For
example, linguistics books are often very graphical in nature and contain
symbols that the OCR packages don't recognize; things like r-underring and
turned V etc. Also some cheap paperbacks do have places where they seem to
be blurred. I scanned a novel that I was assigned to read in French class,
and when I found illegible passages I tried rescanning them. I rescanned
several times changing various settings, but certain passages absolutely
refused to scan. I don't really plan to submit it to Bookshare anyway, but I
would prefer this scan, with a couple of blurred lines every 20 pages or so,
to no scan. I'm able to use this in class with no problems, so in my opinion
this is far better than nothing. Finally, I have another French book which
has very glossy pages and lots of flashy graphical design. Again, even with
a lot of work on experimenting with different settings my results were not
encouraging. This I definitely won't submit to Bookshare because I can't get
it in good enough shape; the effort required would be far beyond the
benefits. I agree that careless scanning is unreasonable, and think that
validating is important. It always takes me much longer to validate
something than to scan it because I read the whole book and fix every error
that can possibly be fixed. Not every validator is going to do that, and
certain books, such as enormous textbooks, really would require a great
investment in time to proof thoroughly. So it isn't realistic to expect
every book to be flawless. What I would really like eventually, and I know
this isn't realistic either, would be to have all the fair-quality books
rescanned.
Kellie
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