The ZX Spectrum Explored by Tim Hartnell

[PeterJ]

I have a spare copy of the above book. Its been well read, but it's all in place with no damage to the pages. None of the pages are loose.

Rather than taking it to the charity shop I thought I would follow [mention]R-Tape[/mention] and offer it here. Free of charge, just pay postage at cost.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

I see there's no pdf available in the archive. Any chance of scanning it before sending it? Many people would enjoy reading it.

[PeterJ]

Unfortunately, I don't think I will have the time or the facilities.

[PROSM]

I'll take your generous offer, [mention]PeterJ[/mention]. Sending you a PM now.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Unfortunately, I don't think I will have the time or the facilities.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Scanning a book is not as easy as scanning a inlay

Anyway, if anyone can scan it, it would be great. It seems quite an interesting book and I think it should be preserved.

[djnzx48]

Does anyone have experience with scanning books? There are a few books I've thought about making scans of, but a flatbed scanner doesn't seem like the best option as the pages would get all bent. Would a camera on a tripod be suitable? Failing that, there's always the good old method of typing it all out.

[PROSM]

Does anyone have experience with scanning books? There are a few books I've thought about making scans of, but a flatbed scanner doesn't seem like the best option as the pages would get all bent. Would a camera on a tripod be suitable? Failing that, there's always the good old method of typing it all out.

I could probably make a scan of the book for ZXDB, hence why I took the offer.

[Einar Saukas]

Does anyone have experience with scanning books? There are a few books I've thought about making scans of, but a flatbed scanner doesn't seem like the best option as the pages would get all bent. Would a camera on a tripod be suitable? Failing that, there's always the good old method of typing it all out.

I could probably make a scan of the book for ZXDB, hence why I took the offer.

Awesome, thank you!

[djnzx48]

Yep, that sounds great, I just worded that badly. I was wondering if people have had success using a standard flatbed scanner for scanning books in general. Laying the pages flat and going through the entire book like that seems like it could possibly damage the spine?

[1024MAK]

It depends on if you are happy to destroy the book or not.

For the best quality scans, you need the complete page to be totally flat. For that, it means removing the pages from the spine, so if need be, you cut the spine off.

Of course, if you are not happy to destroy the book, using a camera is better. But you then have to get the lighting right. And the distortion on the edge of the page makes the OCR process a lot more error prone...

Mark

[hikoki]

yes, I have another book from Tim Hartnell and tried this program https://www.naps2.com with a flatbed scanner. It is a time consuming process and quite hard for the book spine. I would like to know some tips to keep all pages the same size, remove yellow backgrounds and letters from the other side of a page that shine through,etc. Is there a quick way to scan books?

Edit:

I use this kind of glue to repair books https://www.mundoceys.com/producto/48/c ... nca-rapida
white tail for wood,fabric,cardboard and paper which remains elastic

[hikoki]

there are services like this http://overnight-scanning.eu/book/order/
scanning a book with 270 pages may cost like 35 pounds or less if you allow them to destroy it in the process ouch

[hikoki]

Another option would be using a scanner app. Never tried any of these https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/mobile-do ... nner-apps/

[djnzx48]

Good idea, that might be an ideal solution if the camera is good enough. It would probably require a bit more work to get all the pictures though.

[Bizzley]

If you're on a budget then use a proper flatbed book-scanner like the Plustek Opticbook 3800 or 3900. These have a very small distance between the edge of the scanner and the start of the scanning plate, approximately 5mm, that allows you to get in real tight with the guttering without having to break the spine. The Opticbook has a fast scan mechanism as well, twelve seconds to scan, process and save a colour A4 page at 300dpi but smaller greyscale book can be processed a lot faster. All-In-One printers are basically useless for any kind of book scanning as are most of the flatbeds that you can buy in the shops. If you do use an Opticbook then try and get hold of a small program that came with older versions of the driver software called Scanner Utility, it allows you to micro-shift the scan head alignment up to and beyond the edge limit of the scanner.

You don't usually have to break the spine for use on an Opticbook, the angle of page opening for scanning on thinner books comes in at around 95 degrees which won't harm the book at all. BUT the glue on cheap perfect-bound books dries out over time and will crack leading to the pages coming loose if you open it more than about 45 degrees so you should test it first. If it can make an L-Shape with the book open without problems then it should be OK for the Opticbook. If not and you want to keep the book intact then you'll have to try a non-destructive method like a multiple camera\glass plate-based system (good results but expensive) or cheaper photo-scanning hardware. These always look great in the ads and demos but they're usually using a magazine or book that can open somewhere close to 180 degrees, anything shallower introduces a lot of shadows and warping of the image.

Scan Tailor (free software) is the best way to process the scanned pages, it can automatically batch split, deskew, select content, add margins and dewarp pages. This is how you make sure all the pages end up being the same size. There is some rudimentary despeckling and Equalization functions but the latter can sometimes be too heavy on photographs causing them to white-out in some cases. Illumination Equalization should get rid of some text bleeding through from a backing page and remove some of the problems associated with foxing but it's not perfect.

You should feed the results from Scan Tailor into a proper batch imaging program, ImBatch is both free and pretty good at cleaning up old scans but you will have to experiment to get the best results. A typical filter flow for old, yellowed paperbacks (you can remove the yellowing by saving as greyscale in Scan Tailor) would be: Adjust the white and black curves to remove shadowing and text bleeding, apply Gaussian blur to soften up the lettering, adjust Brightness and Contrast for fine tuning, Sharpen to bring the text back into focus. Sometimes running the filters in reverse order can bring better results, especially with crisper source material, but it's all down to trial and error in the end if you want the best results.

PDF creation all depends on whether you want to make the text searchable or not, OCR it if you do or use a simple JPG to PDF creator if you don't. Or convert it to the faster displaying .CBR or .CBRZ format if you're not going to OCR it.

[PeterJ]

I've not tried this Android application, but it gets good reviews and a friend of mine scanned an MSX book with it.

https://www.camscanner.com

There is also Microsoft Office Lens (again not tried it personally) which is free.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/offic ... verviewtab

[PROSM]

Thanks for all the advice! I'm probably going to have to do some experimenting with these techniques on a few different books first before I try this with the Tim Hartnell book. I do have a USB flatbed scanner, but I'll need to see which method gives the best results. If that means removing the binding, then so be it, but not before I've had the chance to read it a bit! That Android app looks interesting, though I wonder if my phone camera would give a clear enough image.

[Einar Saukas]

Or convert it to the faster displaying .CBR or .CBRZ format if you're not going to OCR it.

A .CBR is just a set of images (usually .JPG) compressed in a RAR file. And a .CBZ is just a set of images compressed in a ZIP file. They just change the file extension to indicate "intended to be viewed like a book".

For ZXDB, we prefer a set of book scan images stored as PDF instead of CBR/CBZ. The PDF is a more standard format, thus making it much easier for people to read it online or offline. Unless someone can recommend a free good online reader for CBR/CBZ that websites based on ZXDB could use?

[Bizzley]

A .CBR is just a set of images (usually .JPG) compressed in a RAR file. And a .CBZ is just a set of images compressed in a ZIP file. They just change the file extension to indicate "intended to be viewed like a book".

For ZXDB, we prefer a set of book scan images stored as PDF instead of CBR/CBZ. The PDF is a more standard format, thus making it much easier for people to read it online or offline. Unless someone can recommend a free good online reader for CBR/CBZ that websites based on ZXDB could use?

Having had a lot of experience with creating .CBR files I find them much easier to work with than comparable files of the same format i.e. image files in a PDF wrapper. They load faster, display faster, navigate faster and most CBR viewing software comes with a load of image enhancement filters to get the best out of the pages. PDFs are designed to look the same everywhere, they're the MacDonalds of the document encoding world and it's up to people to decide if that's a good or bad thing.

Until there is a decent online CBR reader to consider then stick with PDF, as you say it's a standard format especially when those PDFs are more than just wrapped bitmaps. But some of us just like to do things a bit differently

[hikoki]

A couple open source cbz,cbr readers. There might be more.

https://github.com/codedread/kthoom

https://afzafri.github.io/Web-Comic-Reader/

[ZXDunny]

I was most upset when WOS changed from individual page images to PDF files - rather than navigate or bookmark a pertinent page, I'd have to download the damned PDF every time I wanted to refer to it. Most annoying, and as the books I'd submitted were intended to be single images I was a little miffed that some idiot had converted them to PDF.

I use CBR/CBZ with Perfect Viewer on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 these days - nothing else installed, just that and my books/comics/magazines. It's brilliant, and can handle PDF files for those ridiculous now-impossible-to-separate Speccy books/mags.

I mean, what's the issue with individual png/jpegs? It's not like WOS didn't have a damned reader built in, is it?

[hikoki]

it may be as easy as uploading books in the format of cbr,cbz to archive.org or use their viewer from your own host assuming the script is free to use.
see this magazine for example https://archive.org/details/Scream.Quee ... BR-GREASY/

[PeterJ]

I mean, what's the issue with individual png/jpegs? It's not like WOS didn't have a damned reader built in, is it?

I used to love the WoS built in reader too. We have something similar which allows the forward and back, but it's not as feature risk as that was. You can also bookmark pages as well as the URL has the magazine, issue and page number. For example:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/mag.php ... 54&page=31

I'm with the PDF camp for general use. Especially when the files have been OCR enabled. Browsers like Chrome display PDFs without any additional software needed which just suits my needs.

[hikoki]

Hi Peter. Let me insist as I believe Archive.org makes the OCR from any zipped folder with images that you upload. Besides, you can also updoad other files like pdf. Have you tried the magazine above? The search function works really well. Perhaps you just have to upload a zipped folder with images inside and they generate the pdf for you as well.

[PeterJ]

I'm not sure I follow [mention]hikoki[/mention] sorry. But we do.offer PDFs of Magazines to download to, as well as the JPEGs. All are hosted on archive.org.