The New History of Mankind: Who Are we? What are we? How did we get here?

Altair said:
I can help with PDF editting if you want. I just need a clean scan.
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That's fantastic you can do the PDF via OCR so it can be used in text form. Thank you for the 'Adam&Eve Story' file from Graham Hancock thread too! Later on I will post some scans of Mary Settegast's book so you can confirm if it will work for you. Will follow Laura's request to do it precisely to keep the colors at their best.
 
I apologize for the delay, especially to Oxajil who's been waiting for me to come up with the test scan... I am running my PC on Linux and no matter what I tried I could not make my multifunctional Samsung printer/scanner to work for scanning which I have not tried before. Fortunately, I kept Windows installation on my laptop just in case I need it sometimes so now after weekend of Win lessons everything is working and I created a test file (8MB) of Plato Prehistorian scan which I would like you to have a look at and tell me whether the quality is good enough to proceed with the scan of the entire book.

The PDF file contains the first 11 pages of the book (scanned at 300dpi) and for the text it could be ok. I plan to rescan it at 600dpi if it helps with OCR. Pages 12-15 of the PDF are pages no.22-25 from the book as they are good to judge the quality of scan (maps & pictures). After experimenting with 600/1200dpi in different brightness and contrast I chose 600dpi with b/c unchanged. I would like to make the map with the names of rivers which are in a non-black color more readable but playing with settings didn't give me a satisfying result so at the end the 600dpi with standard value setting for brightness and contrast is best imo.

Your comments are very welcome. If you say to do it 1200dpi then I will proceed accordingly.

One more thing. The hardcover binding does not allow the first and last dozens of pages to be scanned very cleanly and with straight edges, also the book must be pressed quiet hard against the scanner to make the edges readable well enough. I presume the middle part of the book will go more smoothly.
 
No worries, anka, I've been scanning in the meantime! Okay, so your scans are more yellowy than mine. I scanned several at 600 dpi, but the difference with 300 dpi is not that much. The only thing that is a bit tricky to read are the image descriptions (due to the color of the font!), which cannot be made more readable otherwise with my settings. But it's readable if zoomed in or printed in black/white.
 

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Oxajil said:
No worries, anka, I've been scanning in the meantime! Okay, so your scans are more yellowy than mine. I scanned several at 600 dpi, but the difference with 300 dpi is not that much. The only thing that is a bit tricky to read are the image descriptions (due to the color of the font!), which cannot be made more readable otherwise with my settings. But it's readable if zoomed in or printed in black/white.
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You are a star :)

Yes, the paper in my copy seems to experience the tooth of time a bit more. I could make it white in the software but than the magic of pictures was half gone. Your scan is pretty. So now the question is, could we combine the two different scans into one file without having it like a patchwork? 🤔 Well, Bible is also made of two completely different parts, no? :whistle: Let's wait for others to chime in.
 
anka said:
You are a star :)

Yes, the paper in my copy seems to experience the tooth of time a bit more. I could make it white in the software but than the magic of pictures was half gone. Your scan is pretty. So now the question is, could we combine the two different scans into one file without having it like a patchwork? 🤔 Well, Bible is also made of two completely different parts, no? :whistle: Let's wait for others to chime in.
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Oxajil's scan looks very good but I notice they are jpegs and not PDF. Is there a difference in appearance? If printing in black and white makes things better, maybe that's the way to go.
 
Laura said:
Oxajil's scan looks very good but I notice they are jpegs and not PDF. Is there a difference in appearance? If printing in black and white makes things better, maybe that's the way to go.
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There is a small difference in appearance. I created a small PDF and uploaded it on the website anka uploaded his: here. I just noticed that page 177 still has a faint line of yellow due to scanning, but I found a way to remove such lines or spots, so I'll remove that one too!
 
Oxajil said:
No worries, anka, I've been scanning in the meantime! Okay, so your scans are more yellowy than mine. I scanned several at 600 dpi, but the difference with 300 dpi is not that much. The only thing that is a bit tricky to read are the image descriptions (due to the color of the font!), which cannot be made more readable otherwise with my settings. But it's readable if zoomed in or printed in black/white.
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It's better to use at least 600 dpi resolution. Anything less may cause problems during text recognition.
 
Laura said:
Oxajil's scan looks very good but I notice they are jpegs and not PDF. Is there a difference in appearance? If printing in black and white makes things better, maybe that's the way to go.
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Jpegs can be combined into PDF and yes, ideally it's better to scan the whole book with black and white setting unless we really want to have color images. Another approach would be to scan the whole book in black and white and additionally pages with images in color so that I can add them manually to PDF.

anka said:
Yes, the paper in my copy seems to experience the tooth of time a bit more. I could make it white in the software but than the magic of pictures was half gone. Your scan is pretty. So now the question is, could we combine the two different scans into one file without having it like a patchwork? 🤔 Well, Bible is also made of two completely different parts, no? :whistle: Let's wait for others to chime in.
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You can just send them to me (ideally as raw images). I have software to do this.
 
Altair said:
ideally it's better to scan the whole book with black and white setting unless we really want to have color images.
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From what I see so far, there doesn't seem to be any full color images. So having the illustrations (which appear to be sepia) as black and white wouldn't detract anything from the book, imo.
 
fabric said:
From what I see so far, there doesn't seem to be any full color images. So having the illustrations (which appear to be sepia) as black and white wouldn't detract anything from the book, imo.
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Yes, if the book contains only sepia images then the whole book can be just scanned in black and white with at least 600 dpi resolution.
 
Laura said:
Oxajil's scan looks very good but I notice they are jpegs and not PDF. Is there a difference in appearance? If printing in black and white makes things better, maybe that's the way to go.
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From what I could see there should not be any visual difference between raw scan JPG and a PDF file created from it.

Altair said:
It's better to use at least 600 dpi resolution. Anything less may cause problems during text recognition.
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Point taken.

Altair said:
ideally it's better to scan the whole book with black and white setting unless we really want to have color images. Another approach would be to scan the whole book in black and white and additionally pages with images in color so that I can add them manually to PDF.
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Ok, so I will do another another batch of B&W scan in high resolution and see how that looks. Adding color images afterwords might be quiet time taking and it could be tricky as there are also pages with illustrations on side. Would that not be too difficult for you? Just thinking...
 
anka said:
Ok, so I will do another another batch of B&W scan in high resolution and see how that looks. Adding color images afterwords might be quiet time taking and it could be tricky as there are also pages with illustrations on side. Would that not be too difficult for you? Just thinking...
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Can you confirm that the book contains only sepia illustrations and doesn't have any full-color images? Can you scan a couple of pages with 600 dpi and 1200 dpi resolution? I want to run both through text recognition programm and see whether there is a difference. Other question: you and @Oxajil have two different copies of the book and just want to divide the work? Sorry, if I missed that.
 
So this file is a raw scan of pages 42-43 (one is text with illustration on side and the other a map). Done without cropping the pages.

I tried 3 resolutions, 600/800/1200dpi, each of them in B&W and also in gray scale. To me it appears nicer in gray scale mode because you see the difference between sepia and black which gives it a pleasant feel. On the other hand that mode reveals some areas of pages that were not completely sitting on the scanner plane (the book has apparently experienced some humid environment so the pages are not totally straight, rather wavey. Also, the B&W scan shows hundreds of little black dots all over the pages. However, if the B&W scan is better for OCR, it's fine with me.

In the file the 12 pages go like this:

p1... p42 - 600dpi B&W
p2... p42 - 600dpi gray scale
p3... p42 - 800dpi B&W
p4... p42 - 800dpi gray scale
p5... p42 - 1200dpi B&W
p6... p42 - 1200dpi gray scale
p7... p43 - 600dpi B&W
p8... p43 - 600dpi gray scale
p9... p43 - 800dpi B&W
p10... p43 - 800dpi gray scale
p11... p43 - 1200dpi B&W
p12... p43 - 1200dpi gray scale
 
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