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This doesn't sound like it's coming from the perspective of someone looking to archive or preserve these books, but rather someone who is looking to exploit oth

This doesn't sound like it's coming from the perspective of someone looking to archive or preserve these books, but rather someone who is looking to exploit other people to produce something they can monetize with no regard for quality. They're accepting a container format (PDF) that's just a wrapper around a JPEG, PNG, TIFF or other rasters. Or they'd like a lossy format (JPEG) with no suggested compression settings. They'd like you to use the enhancement features/filters of your scanner software which is like Instagramming your photos. Presumably because they don't have a processing workflow in place to perform this themselves. They want you to convert what will natively be captured as RGB to CMYK, something you generally don't leave up to amateurs if you have any interest in maintaining an accurate conversion. That all tells me they don't care to have quality master scans they can go back to, they just want something passable they can sell to others.

e1ven 11y ago
To be fair, if the company doesn't have the masters any more, but they want to give people legal access, they need to start somewhere... After they have a scanned copy, they at least have the ABILITY to re-type the text, fix the formatting, etc. I empathize a lot with what they're trying to do. Imagine if you're a passionate employee, who cares about the books you grew up with. They're fun to read, and you really want to give more people access to them. After months of pushing, your bosses give-in - Sure, sell the only stuff online.. But this isn't likely to make much money, so we're not giving you a budget for the project. This gives them a way to get started - If the titles sell, and are popular, they can go back, and argue that it's worth improving their quality. If not, at least they're legally available at ALL, and that's better than letting them be forgotten.
- cptskippy 11y ago
  Those are some valid points but the request to use descreening filters seems strange. Descreening is used to remove halftoning from images, not text.
Washuu 11y ago
It also does not sound like they have much experience scanning old printed materials either. There are many little issues that can come up with graphics and text during scanning that can only be corrected by rescanning a page. For example, if a graphic has a mosaic pattern in it having the page slightly askew when scanned can result in artificial artifacts especially when scanning at 300 DPI. Scanning at a higher resolution, 600+ DPI, then downsampling after clean up can avoid issues with graphics. The RGB to CMYK is true as well. Scanning black and white pages then converting to CMYK can result in black colors that are not rich and/or do not match the touch up colors. Source: I have previously interned doing manga book translation which required cutting books apart and scanning them.

e1ven 11y ago

To be fair, if the company doesn't have the masters any more, but they want to give people legal access, they need to start somewhere... After they have a scanned copy, they at least have the ABILITY to re-type the text, fix the formatting, etc. I empathize a lot with what they're trying to do. Imagine if you're a passionate employee, who cares about the books you grew up with. They're fun to read, and you really want to give more people access to them. After months of pushing, your bosses give-in - Sure, sell the only stuff online.. But this isn't likely to make much money, so we're not giving you a budget for the project. This gives them a way to get started - If the titles sell, and are popular, they can go back, and argue that it's worth improving their quality. If not, at least they're legally available at ALL, and that's better than letting them be forgotten.

cptskippy 11y ago
Those are some valid points but the request to use descreening filters seems strange. Descreening is used to remove halftoning from images, not text.

Washuu 11y ago

It also does not sound like they have much experience scanning old printed materials either. There are many little issues that can come up with graphics and text during scanning that can only be corrected by rescanning a page. For example, if a graphic has a mosaic pattern in it having the page slightly askew when scanned can result in artificial artifacts especially when scanning at 300 DPI. Scanning at a higher resolution, 600+ DPI, then downsampling after clean up can avoid issues with graphics. The RGB to CMYK is true as well. Scanning black and white pages then converting to CMYK can result in black colors that are not rich and/or do not match the touch up colors. Source: I have previously interned doing manga book translation which required cutting books apart and scanning them.