[Coco] Archiving articles: To scan or not to scan?

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Bob Devries may have mentioned these words:

>Sheet feed scanners are no good if you want to scan articles out of books 
>or magazines. My Canon scanner has a removable lid, which makes it easy to 
>scan even thick books.

The OP stated that he was going to "clear out" his mags -- or hack 'em up 
anyway. My suggestion:

Take the mags you no longer want to a local print shop and ask if they'll 
trim off the binding for you. They generally will for a pretty cheap price 
if there's no staples used in the binding.

Then you can easily use a sheet-fed scanner archive what you want[1] - if 
there's more than 1 or 2 articles in each magazine you want to archive, 
most of the time will be spent futzing around trying to get the page 
straight on the scanner which is a pain with a still-bound book or magazine.

I started the "archive what I want but leave the books whole" thing a while 
ago with about 20 years of Wood magazine - I got through _almost_ 2 years 
before I decided it was way too much work futzing with the books... and 
despite my computer being 5 years old, it's still fairly "smokin'" as it's 
a dual Athlon MP 2600+. Horsepower wasn't the issue for me to backburner 
the project...

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

[1] Another poster mentioned OCR -- unbinding the books will help a lot 
with that as well, as it will reduce edge binding distortion.

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com          |