jon said:
My focus on scanning goes beyond just OCR purposes -- I think if substantial work is being expended to acquire and scan a book, it takes only a little extra effort to scan at archival quality, which is at least 600 dpi optical (and 256 color greyscale for bitonal and even better 24-bit color.)
i used to agree with you on this, jon. when a page was originally printed as black ink on white paper, i do not see why to scan it as anything but b/w. you're just increasing the difficulty. it was your example project of scanning "my antonia" that convinced me of this. :+) the huge size of those scans made them unnecessarily hard to create and process, in terms of time, difficulty, and resources. (far more than "only a little extra effort".) the realization struck home more fully with your "kama sutra" scans, when you asked for advice in what was essentially converting them _back_ to black/white. color pages? certainly. scan them in color. black-and-white pages? black-and-white scans. and 300 d.p.i. is probably a high enough resolution. if the future wants 'em higher, let the future scan 'em.
http://www.geoffhorton.com/pictureocr/instructions.html has an explanation of what I do.
geoff, i certainly didn't mean to negate your efforts at using a digital camera to scan. as i've said before, i think if you've figured out the factors that will lead to better results when taking that approach, you've learned some very important information, and i applaud you for stepping forward and sharing it with people... :+) -bowerbird