And what about the processing of all those images? There seems to be a lack of free software for efficiently tidying up images obtained from an ordinary, non-a

And what about the processing of all those images? There seems to be a lack of free software for efficiently tidying up images obtained from an ordinary, non-automatic scanner. Sometimes turning raw scans into a nice PDF takes much longer than the manual scanning, so making the scanning faster wouldn't be the first priority for improving things (though better hardware might give images that need less tidying up). Rotating and skewing the image so that the lines of text are horizontal and the margins vertical doesn't seem to be a very hard problem, but I've not seen an easily available and easy-to-use program for doing it. If you end up GIMP-ing each page you can see how that takes longer than the scanning. There are several programs that look for the bounding box of the text and rotate based on that, but they don't work very well: they get confused by page numbers, chapter headings, side notes, and random blotches. It would be better to recognise the lines of text, which is what you really want to be straight and parallel.