Flying Scotsman Scanning Mags
Having invested in the A3 multifunction printer which has an A3 document feeder, processing the magazines should be easy, except the magazines are actually wider then an A4 page and the double side scanning will not work. While it is a bit of a faff, single sided scans can be longer than the ledger page size so the trick is to run the front side through and then slip the back side into the feeder to run them after the fronts have completed. This results in a single file for each scan much like the double sided process, but with the pages in a bit of a funny order. Since the majority of the magazines are only 12 pages, shuffling them back into order is not difficult. Have had to rescan everything because of the cock up with the contrast, the second pass has been done in 10 mag blocks which has worked nicely. I need to process the Dalek project mags at some time, and these have the same size problem, but doing them as I go along will be easier than having to process the whole lot at once. Belt and Braces, the scans are saved initially to the windows ftp server and then I can copy them to the desktop machine, so the raw scans are always available. Having set the printer file name to FlyingScotsman keeps things together, but the count just carries on up from the last scan and so I'm currently up at 35105 ... and counting.
Having copied a bach of ten scans into the 'Flying Scotsman' folder on the desktop machine, the scans are listed in Dolphin at the top of the screen, with the nxt one first on the list. Select it, and open in PDFArranger gives a six sheet spread. Although the first 6 magazines are 8 sides so just need a little longer to reorganize. The six sheet ones start rotated vertically, so sellect all (just as easy to cick to the left and swipe right).
- Right Click -> Rotate Right
- Right Click -> Split Pages
- Select 1,3,5 & 8 -> Drag to end of list
( Ctrl Click then click on one of the set and drag. PDFArranger can be a little 'trigger happy' and may move or duplicate stuff if the mouse is moved while clicking so one has to slow down a little when processing selected pages ) - Right Click -> Reverse Order
( Puts last pages at end ) - Click on 9 and drag between 11 and 12
- Click on 6 and drag between 9 and 10
- Click on 4 and drag between 1 and 2
- Click on 5 and drag to other side of 4
- Even numbered magazines have an A3 spread so select both halves and then Right Click -> Merge Pages
( the resulting page could be better matched but PDFArranger does not have the right tools for that ) - 'Save As' new layout as FlyingScotsman-NNN.pdf
( the save window should have the previous magazine above the scan which can simply be selected and the number updated ) - Closing PDFArranger should return to Dolphin and the selected scan, so a 'Del' will delete that and bring the next mag to the top ready to repeat the process.
Once a set of 10 has been completed, I've been pulling out the cover sheets and sorting the Assembly Instructions, with a subset of Parts List pages. The page numbering in the magazines ignores the first two pages so the third page is numbered 'Page 1'. At some point I will produce a set of 'books' with the rest of the content murged together, but no rush on that. For now I've just created FlyingScotsman-FrontCovers.pdf with the unnumbered pages from each magazine, FlyingScotsman-AssemblyInstructions.pdf with pages 1 to up to 4 as some magazines only have a couple of pages while others contain a few more steps. In addition some magazines have a 'Part 2' section where earlier completed steps are rolled back with new parts. These are where I would like to avoid the earlier step and just go direct to the final one. The third complilation is FlyingScotsman-PartsList.pdf which is mainly just the page 1 content, but there are a few extra Part 2 pages which document the ammended parts.
Almost 2.3rds of the way through rescanning, so back to complete 71-80 and then scan the final 45 magazines.