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A comment on Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami. Parent comment

Re:Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami by lidavidm on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:52PM (#36207474)
Using heat is common in a similar hobby(?), translating (older) Japanese manga. You would use a hair dryer or clothesiron to melt the glue in the spine, pull apart the pages/clean off the glue, and scan them in. That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads. (After scanning, you'd have to clean up the image a lot still, but oh well.) I can imagine here you also just don't want to damage the pages, even if the damage seems infinitesimal.

It doesn't happen so much anymore for manga since things are mostly digital. Though some publishers still publish at 1200x800 (looking at you, Hakusensha!) or worse (I think one site uses like, 900x600?). Mostly these days this would only happen for self-published works (which are still distributed in limited quantities and in physical format only, oftentimes). Or apparently publishers occasionally just...lose the digital files. (Though I can't find where I read this anymore.)

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Re:Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami by noisy_boy on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:28PM (#36207685)
> That way you don't shave off 2-page spreads.

A very good point

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Re:Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami by textfiles on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:29PM (#36207697)
Also, people have already contributed thousands for this project, asking for a cutty-cutty machine is a bit much, especially when I'm really getting good with the heat gun.
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Re:Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami by ISL on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:58PM (#36207908)
Scientists routinely request more grant money for research whose difficulty exceeds initial estimates. You're already doing an incredible thing; it is okay to ask for more assistance.
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Re:Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami by coverband on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @12:04AM (#36207946)
So many pages were the same unchanged ads in the Shopper every month. Can't you add in some prefiltering for those to reduce the number of pages actually needed to scan? (Sorry for hijacking the thread...)
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Re:Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami by textfiles on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @12:44AM (#36208182)
No
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Re:Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami by noisy_boy on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @12:51AM (#36208239)
Upvoted with extra strong mouse click on account of cutty-cutty machine.
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Re:Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami by fwlr on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @03:24AM (#36209371)
If you are okay with cutting the spine off, you don’t need a big hydraulic cutter to do it (even though it is objectively the coolest way). Clamping a straightedge to the book and running a knife along that edge will cut a handful of pages very cleanly, you just run the knife through over and over. A metal ruler and a Stanley knife will do this just fine - heavy pressure on the ruler and light passes with the Stanley knife. (This is what amateur bookbinders do to trim the edges of books they’re binding when they don’t have access to proper guillotines.)
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