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