Adventure in scanning manuals

[freds]

I have a 1980 Prevost MTH-40 motorhome conversion and decided to scan the manuals so that I could keep them with the bus (which is in a storage area) and have them available on my computer for access at home.

To do this I used my combination HP scanner and printer.

The Prevost manuals are fairly much one-sided material until you get to the parts manual which if a subgroup assembly was made up of a large number of parts it would spill over on to the backside. I did my scanning one section at a time and would preview that section to see if there was any content on the back side of the pages. If so, I would scan that section as double-sided material and then use the editing feature of the scanner software to delete the blank pages.

However, all the pages in the manual was not uniformly hole punched!!! This would cause some pages to be frayed at the top which would jam the auto feed on the scanner. The solution is to turn the pages with the frayed edge around; so that would feed normally and then after scanning the section, use the scanner software to turn the image for those pages around before saving the scanned section.

Ok, most of the pages were scannable with the home scanner, however the foldout diagrams would not fit on my scanner.

Hey, they have larger scanners at Kino's, I will just go down there and use their scanner!!!

Left my memory stick at home, so I wound up buying another to transport the scanned documents.

I then took the largest diagram and inserted it in their monster scanner, along with feeding it my credit card and the new memory stick. It sucked that diagram right down and told me that the scan would be $20.00 for that single diagram as they charge $4.99 per square foot and I only had sixteen more diagrams to go!!!

So, I canceled that transaction and left with my newly purchased memory stick.

Activating my way back machine I remember desktop scanners that sucked the paper through and could handle variable page lengths. Crap there isn't one on the market with an eleven-inch throat, they are all eight and one-half inches.
OK, just going to have to do multiple scans and stitch them together. Wait a second there is such a thing as photo sticking software a quick google search finds the following site:

https://www.photostitcher.com

So, I download the demo and then scanned my four page document in about seven sections using the scanner software in full bed mode and kept adding pages for each section and then saving all the images.

I then use the photo stitcher software to import all the images, click the stitch button and hey it just works!!!

However, it won't save the result as it's a demo, I could have done a screen snapshot (I have a mega large monitor) but hey the software with taxes is only about $22.00 and good software should be paid for!!!

Before:



After:

[chessie4905]

A few years back, had my brake diagrams and foldout electrical and rest of wiring diagrams quadrupled in size. Now much easier to read when tracing brake or wiring circuits.