Re: Somewhat OT: Music Scanning Query

[Brian Dichter <dbrian...>]

on 1/24/2001 3:24 PM, Warschauer (at) aol(dot)com at Warschauer (at) 
aol(dot)com wrote:

> This is somewhat off topic (I apologize), but I'll bet that there are mavens
> out there who can answer my questions (and I don't know where else to ask).
> 
> I'm interested in getting a scanner to use with my collection of old Yiddish
> song books, choral arrangements and sheet music.  Some of the material is
> quite old and not in the greatest shape.  In addition, I have a large
> collection of hand-notated transcriptions of klezmer and Hasidic tunes.
> 
> Does anyone have any idea what kind of resolution I will need to make good,
> clean scans of this material?  Any other issues regarding contrast (for
> example, faint notes on yellowed paper)?
> 
> Could I use any flatbed scanner, or (since I'm scanning books), does it need
> to be any special type?
> 
> I've got a Mac PowerBook G3 with USB.
> 
> Finally, any ideas regarding format?  Is it worth investing in Adobe Acrobat?
> 
> 
> I'm a novice at this, so any info would be appreciated!
> 
> Thanks very much in advance,
> 
> Jeff Warschauer

Jeff, I can recommend the Microtek Scanmaker X6. I'm using this now with a
G4 and I used it previously with a G3. I think it was about a hundred
dollars or less and was bundled with Adobe PhotoDeluxe. I use Adobe
Photoshop to edit images and although it is full of features and
professional tools, it is quite expensive and there is a steep learning
curve unless you have a lot of time. You can probably touch up your scans
easily with PhotoDeluxe.

If you are planning to capture a lot of text then you another option is to
use a good OCR application like OmniPage Pro. From my experience OCR
scanning is a big pain and ultimately requires a lot of extra work to clean
up the scans. I doubt that this method would be successful in dealing with
music notes, for example.

Any flatbed scanner compatible with your Mac (usb connection and Mac
drivers) should be fine. You will need to make a few scans to get a feel for
what it can do and to become familiar with the scanning software.

Format depends on how you will handle your scans. If I was going to do this
project, I would scan the images, edit them and save them as either .tif or
.eps files (unless they were going to the web--then .jpg or .gif). I would
place these files into a page layout application (Quark, for example) and
organize separate files to reflect the different books (unless they were
going to the web in which case I'd make them available on the web by making
simple web page templates for the various books with links to the .jpg or
.gif files. There are several shareware applications that will generate
simple web page galleries for your images.)

I wouldn't recommend Adobe Acrobat unless you intend to share and/or
distribute your files to others who may be on different platforms. The key
advantage to Acrobat is that it will transform a postscript document to the
pdf, preserving any artwork and fonts in a nice, compressed file.


hope this info is helpful to you, 8)
brian
-- 
"Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't
matter." --Jack Benny

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