Aan 20-01-97 0:17, in bericht <[log in to unmask]>, Arjen


Joao and all others

You asked more details about scanners. I asked my son and this is the answer.

                                                             Ida

Kamphuis <[log in to unmask]> schreef:

> Dear booklovers,
>
> My mother subscribes to the PD-list and showed me a letter from someone
> having severe problems with reading normal books. If holding the book steady
> or the size of the letters is a problem you computer can help out. Don't be
> baffled by all the technical stuff, and don't hesitate to ask further
> explanations:
> I reside at:   [log in to unmask]
>


> Technical solutions to a literary problem:
>
> 1.      It's possible to scan the pages of a book, they can then be
>         displayed (enlarged if nessesary) on any computer screen.
>
> Scanners are available from less than one hundred up to several thousand
> dollars. A simple hand-heldscanner is a mouse-like device that can be moved
> over a page or any flat surface. It will capture a picture of that surface
> that can be processed by a computer. Even the cheaper scanners nowadays can
> caputure both color and B/W pictures in resolutions (Dots Per Inch or: DPI)
> that are more than sufficient to read a printed page from the screen.
> If you are planning to scan a lot (a whole book for instance) it might be
> wise to invest a couple of hundred dollars in a tabletop scanner. These
> devices basically look like very small photocopiers and perform the same
> functions as their small hand-held cousins, only faster and with more
> convieniance for the user. If you have an A4-format tabletopscanner
> available to you you can scan entire pages just by one mouse-click. When
> purchasing a tabletop scanner make sure it has a removable lid, otherwise
> thicker books may not fit under it.
> Also: talk to some-one about you computer: scanning pages takes a lot of
> harddisk-space (about 1 megabyte per page, or more) and requires at least a
> 486-processor (Apple-users: sorry I can't translate this to Apple CPU's,
> talk to you dealer) and 4MB RAM-memory.
>
> 2       Once you have scanned the pages of your favorite book:
>         convert them to plain-text, that can be used in any
>         wordprocessor, with OCR-software
>
> OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. OCR-programs can convert a
> scanned picture of letters into a text-file that you can manipulate in any
> wordprocessor and that will take only a fraction of the harddisk-space to
> store. A book stored as digitized pictures could take several hundred
> MegaBytes to store whereas a novel stored as a flat text-file is only a few
> hundred Kilobytes (save a factor thousand in storage!). With most scanners
> you get OCR-software for free, but the quality varies and also depends on
> the speed and memory capacity of you computer. OCR-software will continue to
> improve and computers are doubling there speed every two years so if it
> doesn't work just jet at your home it soon will.
>
> 3       Aren't there book's available as flat-text-files for visually
> impaired persons?
>
> I think there must be, I know there are voice-synthesizers to read
> text-files to people who are visually impaired, so there must be (at least
> small) libraries of digitized books. If you have a book as a text-file you
> can load it into a wordprocessor and set the font-size to 20 or 30 Pts
> (whatever is nessesary if the size of the letters is a problem). Also: since
> books as flat text-files are generally less than one MegaByte you can share
> them over the net with any and everybody. Just don't send a novel to the
> list, the listserver won't like that.
>
>
>          _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
>         _/       Arjen Kamphuis        [log in to unmask]          _/
>        _/                                                          _/
>       _/     The young do not know enough to be prudent, and      _/
>      _/     therefore they attempt the impossible ---            _/
>     _/     and achieve it, generation after generation.         _/
>    _/                                   - Pearl S. Buck        _/
>   _/                                                          _/
>  _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
>