Workflow for Scanned Book (500 pages) ?

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dstahlberg

As part of a community project I have been given the task of making an ebook (PDF or epub) of our two local history books (500+450 pages, phew!). The books' pages have been scanned previously to good TIFF quality. Using ImageMagick I guess they can be converted to any format.

As a long time developer I'm used to all kinds of software tools, but I have not used Scribus before. I'm looking for any pointers or tips on how to get a good workflow to get all the images into Scribus and making a TOC, index and some additional pages. Does Scribus sound like the best tool to use? Can anyone point me to some good tutorial specific to my scenario so I don't have to start with a blank Scribus project?

Any tips or pointers are gratefully appreciated!
"Every observation is an interpretation in light of a theory.", Karl Popper

utnik

i'm not sure if i understand your idea.
if you just place your tiff files, the table of content will be the only real text in your book. as an ebook (.epub) this would be a poor thing. usually the reading devices scale and wrap the text to match some user settings. your 'collection of images' would be static.
the .pdf version might work, (maybe assisted by a script...) but if it's heavy on the text side, you should consider to extract the text with an ocr tool. (requires a lot of proof reading – but if it's worth to make it in one way, it might be worth to make it really good...)

if you have your readable text, something like libreOffice might be the faster solution than scribus. the automatic toc is still a bit on the 'not-so-automatic' side. and the exported .pdf files are not as small (mb wise) as those from some other programs. scribus does a lot of micro typographic work which generates excellent print files but needs some storage space.

utnik

dstahlberg

Thanks utnik for the comments. This is not a case were any solution seems "right on target". The 500+ pages are a mix of text and pictures (photos and drawings). OCR, proof-reading and typesetting a new book with pictures would probably be a lot of work (say 4-5 weeks) - and we still end up with just a "copy/facsimle" of the book. "Same, same but different".

Updating the book, an alternative we considered, would not be an option either - it would be better to start an online wiki with local history that could continuously be updated with new research. The current book is "frozen" with the state of findings up to 35 years ago and we would like to avoid that.

So, the current suggestion is to make a "ebook" of the old book scanned today, as simply as possible, and try to get financing to create a new online wiki, using the old book as starting point.

I understand that Scribus usually has other use cases, but for now I'm looking into all options.

Dan
"Every observation is an interpretation in light of a theory.", Karl Popper

Nermander

Quote from: dstahlberg on April 20, 2022, 10:27:22 AM
The 500+ pages are a mix of text and pictures (photos and drawings).

If I understand you right, no!

The 500+ TIFFs contain IMAGES of text and pictures.

I don't see why you could not "print" the images directly to PDF files and then create the additional pages needed in Scribus and finally merge the different PDFs the way you want the pages to appear in the final version.

Importing 500+ images into Scribus just to convert them to PDF format could probably be done using the scripter, but I bet it will take a lot of time.

dstahlberg

As a "teaser", here is one of the pages (converted to jpeg)  :)

[attachment deleted by admin]
"Every observation is an interpretation in light of a theory.", Karl Popper

AdmFubar

            x              (x)                    The staff at The Public Domain Review might be a good source of howto information as this is something they do often for books the put online.https://publicdomainreview.org/about
I'd ask them for some guidance they may be will to pass something useful along.
Using Scribus 1.6.1, openSUSE 15.6
Advanced hobbyist

dstahlberg

Thanks for the tip AdmFubar!

I guess reading the book from a webpage is a more convenient option. I'll be looking into your tip and also Internet Archive Bookreader. So, I guess no Scribus and downloadable book then :(

Dan
"Every observation is an interpretation in light of a theory.", Karl Popper