I want to scan thousands of newspaper clippings. I want to cut and paste columns so that one can look at one or two pages on a DVD and see a given article, with what may have been a long column or two, cut and pasted into a reasonable page presentation. I will scan the clippings at very low resolution, because they are all B&W and have relatively few photographs in them.
I’ve got a decent scanner but nothing tasty. Here are the questions:
Can I do this entire thing using Adobe Acrobat?
Is there a software package out there that is better suited than Adobe Acrobat? ( It was recommended for this project but I am very open to other suggestions. Haven’t bought any software yet.)
Has anyone done a project like this? I have not, and don’t wish to waste time on dead-end efforts. Suggestions as to how to do this in a logical manner?]
Assuming I could use a single DVD, and assuming I have several thousand articles to scan in, might I reasonably fit them on a single DVD? I forsee creating chapters, with each and every article title listed in a month/year format, so that the reader can easily find an article or time period to peruse.
My father was a newspaperman, and he died 2 months ago today. My goal is to present the family with a DVD documentary of his career as a writer. He wrote for the Philadelphia Evening and Sunday Bulletin for over 10 years. I’ve got until next October to finish this, and want to be careful in the planning. I believe that the execution will be very straightforward, though extremely time-consuming.
Any guidance regarding the design or format, software to use or pitfalls to avoid will be much appreciated. This is in G.Q. because I seek very specific advice and software titles to use for this project.
Almost surely, those newspapers retain the copyright on all that material. So you need their permission before copying it and re-publishing it on a CD/DVD.
But given that your father was a long-time employee, and that you want this as a family memento of his life work, you should not have a hard time getting that. The paper’s lawyers will probably require you to sign an agreement not to sell copies of this, and limiting you to a certain number of copies, but that’s no problem for what you’ve described.
Go to the newspapers in advance and get their permission for this. They’l be much more friendly if you ask in advance.
Of course, you could just go ahead and do it without telling them at all. You face a risk that if they find out someday they could decide to sue you. But, really, that’s unlikely, given the non-commercial nature of what you’re planning to do with it.
Well you are saying that you want a DVD out of this, that will play in regular DVD players… So what you want to make exactly here is a DVD-Video slideshow disk.
I think…
I don’t know squat about making DVD’s really, but it seems to fit your description.
Here is one link in brief: DVD FAQ
…
Random observations:
—The type of input you appear to need for making a DVD-Video slideshow is regular images in some format that the DVD-authoring software will accept, not a PDF or a layout program. A regular image editor can do what you need done to the images, even combining them into larger images.
—If you will want a printed book however, then a layout program would be helpful. I don’t know what all Adobe Acrobat Pro is capable of right off. Examples of layout programs are Quark, Adobe InDesign and PageMaker. I know that the Adobe programs can generate PDF’s directly.
—If you scanner can do 300 DPI, that’s enough for the scanning. I would suggest that you scan the photos in greyscale (256-color grey). If you decide that you want to produce a copy in PDF and you want to decrease the filesize (or if you need to, to fit it onto a CD), there are methods for that which don’t degrade the visual quality too much. Save your images as PNG’s! Not in jpeg or gif formats!!! If you need them in a specific format at the end, then convert them to that format after you are done editing them completely.
—As far as “general organization” goes, if you want to separate them by their publication date, then scan them in and name the image filenames in that format. Also if an article was scanned in more than one image, name the images “X of X”, so you can easily verify all the pieces are there and in order. Use leading zeros for single-digits, so that the files will list in order. Such as for an article from today (Dec 16, 2005) that has three parts, the first image file would be named “y2005m12d16_01of03.png”.
—I don’t know anything about making DVD-Video disks, but I would wonder if there is some limitation of the number of menus or chapters you can insert into a disk’s index. You could definitely have an index of each year, but beyond that I don’t know.
—And there’s other issues as well, but, anyway… those are the mentionables right off.
~
I’m not entirely sure whether the OP was talking about a domestic-playable DVD; the word ‘chapters’ is in there, but that still might only indicate subdivisions of non-DVD video content. A little clarification would be a good thing.
If we’re talking about a computer-viewable disc, then something cross-platform and non-installing would seem a good idea, such as HTML or perhaps Flash.
The reason I mentioned burning the “book” onto a DVD instead of a CD is that I suspected ( perhaps wrongly ) that it would be too large a volume to live on a single CD-ROM. Might be wrong about that. Anyway, I didn’t mean to say I was married to the idea of using DVD-authoring software.
The newspaper went out of business in January of 1982. I hardly have to worry about being sued for copyright infringement. The book will only exist on CD-ROM, and be distributed without profit of any kind to family and friends only. I won’t be losing a wink of sleep about that issue, trust me.
The issue of Chapters does concern me. I want a linking index, similar to the index you find on websites for very large catalogues- say, McMaster-Carr. Their printed catalogue runs in excess of 4,000 pages. The online version must be the largest PDF file out there. And yet, when you go to the index and click on an item, you are taken there. THAT capability is important to me. If someone wants to find a certain article, I don’t see why I cannot have the CD ( or DVD ) composed and authored in a manner that permits it. It may be unweildy to do on a single CD, and if that is the case, I might do a set of CD’s. After all, the burning costs are almost nil these days since I can do them myself. ( We’re talking less than 50 sets).
I will do as you said and save them as .png , not as .jpg- please tell us the difference between the two?
Mangetout, upon reading your post again, I am thinking I should be saying " table of contents", since " Chapter" is a term used in the layout of DVD’s and CD’s that has nothing to do with what I seek.
Is this serious? I would have guessed that the contemplated use falls squarely under the “fair use” doctrine. It does not differ significantly from photocopying and distributing a few copies within the family.
As for producing a book from scanned in pages, I have done that several times, with the authors’ permissions (they held the copyrights, since the rights to an out-of-print book normally revert). Your scanner will usually come with software that allows you to choose the format of the output and if you choose pdf you will be halfway there. (I used specialized software called TeX that allows a lot of flexibility and is free, but I would not recommend it unless you are already a user.)
I think the Adobe program will also allow you to intersperse commentary or divide into chapters. But it is expensive (several hundred dollars, I believe).
They are both image formats that implement compression schemes; jpg uses a compression scheme that works by throwing away parts of the data and approximating them (ideally unnoticeably) - this is called lossy compression.
png uses a set of methods that compress the data losslessly; typically this results in a larger file size, but the advantage is that all of the original image detail is still there, so any subsequent processing (such as colour balance changes or edge enhancement) will work better.
Do you know for sure what kind of computer the recipients will use to view the thing? If it might include more than one family of operating systems, then you need to take that into account when choosing the method of deployment; if it’s just Windows, then there are a number of multimedia presentation tools you could use (including freeware offerings of various functionality and quality) that will compile something that will run standalone. (actually, I think PowerPoint will also do that)
