Model Engineers Library
Over the last many years I have been slowly scanning my copies of Model Engineer and building an electronic library. Up until recently it had been a slow process and part of the process was just to create consolidated articles that I am interested in. The tools available included an OCR package called Finereader for which I had a licence and which allowed the production of proper electronic sopies of that material. Today, I can't access the version of Finereader that the licence goes with, and Abbyy have switched to an annual subscription model. This may be a way I should go, but the free software packages available on my openSUSE linux desktop sort of mitigate against the need. More on that later ... my starting point today was to invest in a rather expencive A3 printer from Brother. The MFC-J6940DW which in addition to printing in A3 also has an A3 document scanner which has proven to be something of a bonus. Over the last few weeks I have run some 11000 sheets through it and have some 250 magazines loaded into the library complete with text search ocr. All are scanned at 600DPI so the drawings are very crisp, but it does mean that each one is aound 100Mb! Since I don't intend to use these over the internet it is not a problem, and a large disk supports them currently. I have had a bit of a problem in that the police have taken the original library of 13000+ books because they have found a few controvertial images from the other websites that I host and I am waiting for them to decide what to do next since I plead guilty to their posession in 2020 and have served my time. I just need them to delete those images they don't like and return all of the Rainbow Digital Media computers seized back then along with the one they took a few weeks back. I am getting off track. This discussion is for another place and time ... back to what I can safely do today.
The printer was a little cheaper than on the brother sales site and I have now seen it a lot cheaper than I paid which is somewhat anoying, but that is part of the problem today and I do have the brother support package. It replaces an old A3 flatbed scanner, and an A4 book scanner, both of which took a substantial amount of time to scan a single magazine. OK I have to take the staples out of the magazines now, but once done it takes minutes to scan all 16 or so A3 sheets and it scans both sides at the same time! The printer is linked direct to the computer, so each scan just appears on the desktop ready for 'post processing'. I will document that in more detail for my own reference, but it may be of interest to others who have a similar problem. Today I don't really have the space to store boxes of mags and so getting them down the recycling center is the obvious path once they are scanned.
Another useful tool on the Linux system is a library system called calibre which I have been using for some time and as I have said, I had built a library of many thousands of books. Such as the complete set of Radio Communications magazines which the RSGB supply on CD ready scanned and searchable. I can at least reload that if push comes to shove as the set of CD's are another box taking up space.
Processing raw PDF scan's from the printer is a realtively easy process which was a bit clunky when I started, but is now more refined and I am ready to de-staple another 50 magazines and push them through.