[bksvol-discuss] Re: text quality

  • From: Guido Corona <guidoc@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 15:46:57 -0500

In k1K 8.0, Grayscale is better in many cases,  but not in all cases.  400 
DPI is often slightly better than 300 DPI,  but not in all cases.
Tweaking brightness with grayscale is not likely to make a difference.
With K1K 7.0 instead,  grayscale will give most frequently lower quality 
results.

In general, Use automatic optimization,  then try grayscale at 400 DPI. 
Compare results,  and use the better of the two. 

Guido


Guido D. Corona
IBM Accessibility Center,  Austin Tx.
IBM Research,
Phone:  (512) 838-9735
Email: guidoc@xxxxxxxxxxx

Visit my weekly Accessibility WebLog at:
http://www-3.ibm.com/able/weblog/corona_weblog.html





Noel Romey <ner@xxxxxxxx> 
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04/29/2004 03:21 PM
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[bksvol-discuss] Re: text quality






Guido,
In theory this is the case, that greyscale shouldn't make a difference but 
I have wondered about it.  When I change my brightness settings, I get 
skewed results, i.e. different ocr errors and recognition settings.  Go 
figure.  Why 400 DPI for books with regular print?  Does this seem to 
increase accuracy at times?  Also, aren't there times in a book where 
static or dynamic versus greyscale would be better.  I've scanned several 
books where this seems to be the case, maybe because of background noise 
on the page or somethingg.

Ner
At 03:02 PM 4/29/2004, you wrote:

Paul,  I also use grayscale at 400 DPI most of the time with Kurzweil 8.0. 
 If you find it is rather slow,  scan images only,  then turn on pure 
recognition before going to sleep.  Your book will be ready when you wake 
in the morning,  no matter how large it is.  By the way,  with grayscale 
brightness makes no difference. 

Guido 


Guido D. Corona
IBM Accessibility Center,  Austin Tx.
IBM Research,
Phone:  (512) 838-9735
Email: guidoc@xxxxxxxxxxx

Visit my weekly Accessibility WebLog at:
http://www-3.ibm.com/able/weblog/corona_weblog.html




"Edwards, Paul" <pedwards@xxxxxxxx> 
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04/29/2004 02:42 PM 
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This is a difficult issue.  I take the approach of carefully checking the 
first few pages at the beginning of a scan.  If there are errors I can 
adjust for, I do that.  I also rescan pages whose value in Kurzweil comes 
back lower than ninety.  I do not tend to scan ninety to ninety-five 
because I can usually not make much of a difference and we are often 
dealing with a screwed over heading or something.

However, I scanned a book recently which was a hard cover and which should 
have scanned like a dream and came out as pure druck.

I have found that optimizing scanning is, for the most part, worth doing. 
The results do not always make me happy in that I am now scanning a book 
using gray scale and sixty which takes forever to scan.  By the way, it is 
legends two edited by Robert Silverberg.

Paul


Paul Edwards, Director
Access Services, North Campus
Phone: (305) 237-1146
Fax: (305-237-1831
TTY: (305) 237-1413
Email: pedwards@xxxxxxxx
home email: edwpaul@xxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: Kellie Hartmann [mailto:kellhart@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 1:04 AM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] text quality


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



Noel Romey
Arkansas, USA
View my insights at my
live journal: http://djner.livejournal.com

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