Re:Ask HN: I scanned an old paper book. How to turn it into ...
by ThinkBeat on Wednesday November 30, 2022 @03:01PM
(#33806779)
Thank you. A lot of good information.
I looked into two companies from a random web search
that scans books and sends you a finished ebook back.
They did not inspire my confidence. I dont believe that they would do or could do the text editing / correction. (given that its not English or any other language. Its in Norwegian)
The books are old and somewhat fragile as well. Sending it travelling around Europe doesn't seem like a good idea.
1. Searchable Text PDF: You can use ImageMagick to convert your source TIFF image files (if you have scanned your pages into TIFF format) into Adobe PDF format. If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can run OCR on it to convert it to a "Searchable" text PDF (aka "text under image" PDF).
2. EPUB Ebook Format EPUB is a ebook standard and at its basic level it is a collection of a (a) metadata file (in XML format), (b) HTML files for each unit of content (such as Chapter/Section/Unit etc., depending on how the book is organized) (c) Image files that are referenced in the HTML files (d) CSS file for styling your HTML. 3. Print-on-Demand If you are interested in creating a print run, that is also possible. A typical workflow would be to (a) scan the pages at high resolution (600 dpi) (b) perform image processing to deskew the images and remove noise and perform quality control (c) batch-align the front and back of the image pages (d) save the page images to TIFF (e) convert TIFF to multipage Adobe PDF. 4. Typesetting In this method, you have a typesetter re-typeset the entire book (in Indesign/QuarkXpress/LaTeX etc.,). This is a much more involved process, but offers you flexibility in terms of how you want to layout the content, perform some editorial changes etc.,