When Lou sends me the output from his camera, a considerable amount of work has to be done to make them into readable / printable form. [PDF]
This is done in stages.
1) Lou uploads them to me via FTP
2) I then have to make certain that they're named in a fashon that will alphabetize them to the correct final "page" sequence.
3) Next, they're copied to a temporary "Working" Folder. [keeping his as original masters]
Image processing is done by Photoshop,
4) I evaluate a couple images to see how they'll be processed. Typically, we end up with something like this:
[*=1]Negative
[*=1]Alter to 256 Greyscale
[*=1]Sharpen Filter
[*=1]Field Flatten Filter
[*=1]Adjust Trapezoidal Distortion
[*=1]Downconvert to a standard resolution
[*=1]Save as compressed TIF
5) This procedure is saved to a Batch Processing Script and the same set of changes is applied automatically to the entire set of pages.
Now we're ready to Re-format them for conversion to PDF.
6) Another editor is used to create a Multi-page TIF file, and each image is manually added to the file. Documents over 100 pages take considerable time as the process of editing gets longer as the number of pages grows. This is a bit maddening and may take up to 2 hours.
7) After reviewing the Multipage TIF to make certain I haven't skipped or inserted pages out of order, we proceed to the final step...
8 ) The Multipage TIF image is copied to yet another system and a program is run which converts it from TIF to PDF format. This is an old command line program and requires me to hit ENTER several times for each page, as it displays warnings as each is processed. [I can't turn off the warnings or supply the pages so they won't happen]
Poof! - if everything goes right, we have a PDF document from that Fiche. [Heaven help us with Multi-Fiche Documents]
Lou's device eliminates the "Mind Numbing" first step, but still takes time too. At least he doesn't need to sit and run it by hand any more, he can "oversee" - presumably occupying his time with something else while it happens.
It is my ultimate hope that a specialized collection of software will aid in chopping up a "Whole Fiche Image" [WFI] into pages, and process them into a PDF with far less human interaction. But this is not yet accomplished.
Note also that PDFs produced in the manner I have described are "Image Only" and do not have OCR'd Text. Such a conversion really requires a human guided PDF editor, isolating diagrams on pages from their textural content. I have yet to find such an editor.
Scanning a "Whole Fiche Image" [WFI] produced "usable" output in one minute, eliminating the immediate need to do over a day's work per Fiche, even if we could sit there that long, to perform the conversion to PDF. The WFI on the other hand, can be shared "As Is" and be on it's way across the Web in minutes rather than waiting for anyone to get "A round TUIT".