Scanning and Converting old materials into electronic format

From: Meints, Richard (R.J.) <"Meints,>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 04:47:54 -0500

As the person who scanned in and cleaned up Pavis, Big Rubble, Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, Runemasters, Plunder, and Griffin Mountain (so far), I can tell you that it is deceptively tougher than it looks.

First and foremost, providing that you have the scanner and software, is the quality of the original documents that you are scanning. For the most part, 20 years of aging on medium quality non-gloss paper, plus the mediocre quailty of the original typesetting (which I will defend by saying that it was quality work at the time, but has slipped in its rating due to the vastly improved modern methods available) make the OCR work (converting the scan to a GOOD text file) rather difficult. The number of typos you have to correct (both from the scanner and the high number of ones that are naturally in the original) is very time consuming. Plus, there are the hard to catch typos where a correctly spelled word in the original is read as a different correctly spelled word, such as "cane" getting converted into "cone".

The good news is that Issaries Inc. is receiving all of the text files from the Gloranthan Classics project as part of the deal. They already have all of Pavis and Big Rubble to chew on, with lots more files coming their way.

The toughest part of scanning in Griffin Mountain was destroying the binding on the original so I could scan it in. I suppose that on the plus side I now have a very handy loose leaf version of it now.

Rick