@ -316,6 +316,8 @@ That's not a huge amount of work, but it's still—work. Surely, there has to be
I searched and I searched, and I was rewarded for that search. Someone mentioned that a program called NAPS2 had this very feature. The name didn't hurt at all—at this point in my life, I am very much in favor of naps, unlike the five year old version of me.
\section{Interleaving}
Even better, NAPS2 had an ``interleave'' feature, which meant that I didn't need to use \texttt{pdftk} to do that.\footnote{To be fair, this is a feature which VueScan also eventually added at some point.} So scanning longer two-sided documents suddenly became a lot easier.
The only problem was that NAPS2 offered \textit{four} versions of this command: interleave, deinterleave, alternate interleave, and alternate deinterleave. (These are very neatly contained under the ``Reorder'' icon in the main menu.) I knew one of those was what I needed; I just needed to figure out which.
@ -349,6 +351,24 @@ That's progress, but it's not the progress I wanted to make. I tried all the dif
If that looks like the original document, it is definitely not an accident; it is by design. Print that out and you get something close to the original.\footnote{I say ``close'' because a scan is never the equivalent of the original. It is a reflection, an imitation. But it is not the same. Every time we copy an analog object, we lose something. Replicative failure is a thing.}
\section{Adjusting the Image Quality of a Scanned Book}
I originally downloaded NAPS2 because I wanted to clean up a scanned book I had downloaded from the Internet Archive. It was an old pulp paperback, published in 1977 on cheap paper not much better than newsprint, and it was \textit{extremely} yellowed.
The way I would normally handle this would be the GIMP method I described earlier. But that's a lot of work for a book I just want to read and be done with. (No archivist work for me here.)
The workflow for this is fairly simple. First you import your pdf using the ``Import'' button. Then you select all the pages and click the ``Image'' button. The options are pretty limited: you can adjust the brightness and contrast, adjust the hue and saturation, or you can sharpen. It also has an image called ``Document Correction'' which is great if you are scanning in a lot of hand written notes and need to add a lot of contrast. (This doesn't work so greatly in the case of a badly yellowed book, unfortunately.)
You're probably not going to get a perfect book back, because the options are pretty limited. The trade-off is that you pick your settings once, and then NAPS2 handles all the work while you go get yourself a cup of coffee—or take a nap.
\section{Adjusting Images}
Even though NAPS2 was designed to be a pdf scanner, it also has the ability to save individual scans as images. Even more importantly, because each scanned page is basically an image, you can also edit each page as an image by double clicking on it, where you get editing options like crop and rotate, in addition to the ones I mentioned earlier. This is pretty handy if you're scanning something like a manual that has different sized pages, or is printed on large sheets and folded into a box so that you have to scan it in sections,\footnote{Every piece of furniture I've ever assembled has instructions like this, but I've run into quite a few manuals that are miniature versions of this, like the earbuds I wear on my daily walk.} or a package that has care instructions.
And if you're wondering why I'm blathering on about manuals, it's because I do keep them. For years, I kept them all in a large three ring binder filled with page protectors that I could slip them into. It was big and awkward, and don't dare tip it the wrong way, or you have manuals all over the floor.
At some point, I realized that most manuals are available in convenient pdf form from the manufacturer's website, so I started just downloading those, making sure the pdf was identical (or identical \textit{enough}) to the original, and then tossing the original in the recycling.
