[Coco] [Color Computer] joining long pages together..something to think about

[stinger30au]

this idea at the moment is a low priority for me, but in the next few weeks its level of importance will rise

i have at the moment 4 aussie coco magazines that are 20cm wide and almost 35 cm long

the length is too long to fit all on to a standard A4 scanner and i dont have the cash to buy an A3 scanner.
if i had an A3 scanner, getting these mags would be a piece of cake.

you dont need my magazine copies to test this, you can do this yourself.

i have done a test scan though of the first 2 pages of my book and if needed i can upload the images.

heres what i did

the first scan is the top 2/3 of the first page and saved as jpeg file
called 1a.jpg

2nd scan is the remainder 1/3 or there about of the first page saved as 1b.jpg

3rd scan is top 2/3 of the 2nd page saved a jpeg called 2a.jpg

4th scan is the bottom 1/3 of the 2nd page saved as 2b.jpeg

get the idea?? i hope so.

anyhow. 
Tim F. on the list who scanned the 1992 and 1993 rainbows from newspaper to pdf did a similar method i believe and stitched them together. i cant remember exaqctly how he did it, he did tell me, but it was all done manually i believe thru a wysiwyg drawing package.
Tim correct me if im wrong here please.


anyhow.

i was thinking there must be a better way for this to be done.
i have emailed the author of the program "gscan2pdf" that i use to produce the pdf files of the mags i have been scanning.
Jeff said his program at this point in time does not do it, but if i can come up with a command line that will do the trick he can implement the solution to the program to make it even better.

so i went hunting and i found an open source program that might just do the trick

its called "hugin"

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

this program is in the ubuntu repos and i have installed it this evening and had a quick test with the demo files from their web site and it works well.

heres a challenge for someone.

see if you can find a command line for this program that will take our scans say

1a.jpg

and

1b.jpg

and join them together to give

1.jpg


2a.jpg joins to 2b.jpg to give 2.jpg


this would join the files together automagically and very quickly rather then do it by hand.

*IF* this can be done, all that needs to be done then is to notify Jeff, the author of gscan2pdf and this feature can be added to the program and people worldwide will benefit from this who use the program.

once we have the pages joined we can easily join them all together with pdftk and produce a pdf. im not sure if we can go stright from jpg file to djvu or not.
that can be investigated further down the track. not a priority at this point in time. auto stitching the files is much higher on the importance list.

let me know your discoveries folks.im keen to find something that works efficiently and saves man hours.