Date: Fri, 7 Nov 1997 10:48:26 +0100
From: jmaczew1@gwdg.de
Subject: Re: 11.0230 hand-held scanners
Apart from the legal questions, the use of hand-held scanners to
"copy" books is a tricky one in itself. I suggest a short check-list:
First, the fundamental consideration:
1. Which kind of sources do you intend to scan (important criteria
are paper and font size, print quality, used fonts, used styles (incl. footnotes, quotations, etc.))
Then, the basic technical consideration:
2. Is there a system that supports your project?
* Hardware: a) Does your notebook support the particular scanner?
b) Is a separate power supply required?
c) How long can you scan using batteries?
* Software: a) Does the scanner's software run on your system
without difficulties?
b) How long does an average scan take?
c) How much time do you need to spend on post-processing?
In 1994, when I was technical advisor to a project intending to scan
19th century german texts, we experimented with hand-held scanning
but could not find a convincing solution. For modern texts, the situation might be
better by now, but it's still rather time and money consuming to scan
and post-process texts scanned in "hand-heldedly", I should think.
Jan-Mirko Maczewski
U of Goettingen
jmaczew1@gwdg.de
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