[Coco] Scanning and storing documents (CoCo related, of course!)

[Ricardo M. Ferreira]

On 2018-01-12 15:28, coco-request at maltedmedia.com wrote:

> Oneof the 1st things I do whenever I buy (or borrow) a new(or used) piece of hardware or software is to read the manualsthoroughly. Once I have done that, the 2nd thing I do isto scan the manuals (for future reference). It also helps in caseyour dog eats one of them.

Same here, but my workflow is different.

For everyday stuff (such as new manuals) I use Readiris Pro for Windows 
- it came for free with my scanner, IIRC. It scans a page with one 
click, (optionally) optimizes the page (automatically rotates, deskew, 
etc.) and with another click does OCR and exports into one of many 
formats, including PDF, Word, OpenOffice and more. It has an excellent 
option for PDF compression (similar in quality to DjVu) if you don't 
mind artifacts when zooming in. I store those PDFs in Evernote, for very 
fast search, viewing, annotation (with the free PDF-XChange Viewer) and 
sharing on my PC and mobile devices.

Some time ago I gave away many old books (even CoCo related, such as the 
Input collection, Micro Adventure books, ...), but digitized them before 
letting them go. To preserve them I used a dSLR camera for very fast and 
good capture, and the open source Scan Tailor software to clean up and 
assemble the images. With that I digitized thousands of pages in a week. 
A demo version of Adobe tools was used to create the final PDFs, later 
uploaded to https://datassette.org , a Brazilian repository of classic 
hardware information. If anyone is interested in seeing what's available 
there for the CoCo, visit https://datassette.org/livros/tandy-trs-color

I just moved to a new home and plan to digitize a whole lot more paper 
to throw or give away. I hope to test an old Nokia 808 PureView (with a 
40 MP camera) as a semi-permanent "scanner". If I can get it to produce 
good quality results, I plan to release the details and software for free.

[]s!