Author Topic: Scans and snapshots  (Read 14272 times)

Victor Ivrii

  • Administrator
  • Elder Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2607
  • Karma: 0
    • View Profile
    • Personal website of Victor Ivrii
Scans and snapshots
« on: March 11, 2018, 07:45:46 AM »
Some students post a snapshot of the solution, and lament that I rejected it as unreadable. The same story goes with doctor's notes, they email me; these snapshots are up to 8.5 MB for one page document. I think I need to clarify:

Indeed, it is a high resolution snapshot, and while downloaded looks passable. But I find it unacceptable that to see it  properly, people need to download it. And in forum it does not fit into window (when you click on it) exactly because of its high resolution (lots of pixels). And both snapshots take 360KB, which is way too much. Imagine,  if the scan of a book of 200 pages was made in a similar way, it would be 36 MB. And most of these 36 MB would be wasted on the yellow colour of the pages. To make things worse your pages are not strictly horizontal.

You see,  out of the box your smartphone is not a scanner, which in the proper s/w setup (select "text" input) would make it black-white (bitonal), not even grayscale, leave alone colour, and would make pages properly oriented. Special s/w for smartphone can mitigate these shortcomings. Please see my post below.

Please scan, either using a regular scanner, or your smartphone with a proper s/w.
« Last Edit: April 22, 2018, 05:43:10 AM by Victor Ivrii »

Victor Ivrii

  • Administrator
  • Elder Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2607
  • Karma: 0
    • View Profile
    • Personal website of Victor Ivrii
Re: Scans and snapshots
« Reply #1 on: March 18, 2018, 04:39:19 AM »
How to make a scan using your smartphone:

1) Put you paper on the even dark surface properly

2) Provide a good light

3) Use dedicated "scanning" s/w, not general photo s/w. It will understand what kind of the document you have, capture it without its surroundings. Some is free, other is low-cost

* Scannable for iOS

* My scans for iOS and Android.

* Scanner Pro for iOS.

* Cam Scanner for iOS and Android

* PS. If you know other similar s/w, please share

4) If needed, manually post-process snapshot on smartphone, or on computer. You can  crop and  rotate your picture, Scanner Pro allows OCR=Optical Character Recognition.



« Last Edit: March 21, 2020, 12:30:10 PM by Victor Ivrii »