I finally have a version of my Scan Tailor PDF assembly script ready to go! (Took long enough, right? ) I'm interested in getting some feedback and bugtesting. If you prefer to use PDF for your e-books, or need PDF for compatibility, I think you'll find this utility very useful. I originally wrote it as an internal utility at the County of Brant Public Library to distribute PDF e-books on the County of Brant Public Library Digital Collections website. I'll be releasing the source under GPLv3 once a final release is ready.
PDFMaker is a pretty simple commandline program. It takes output TIFFs from Scan Tailor, and assembles them into a PDF ready for viewing on a computer or handheld device. Unlike most PDF compression software for this type of task, it treats image and text compression separately to get smaller file sizes.
Before running PDFMaker, you need to install ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick. Just install them to the default location and you'll be fine.
The syntax is easy. To use it, run it from a DOS commandline, then type
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pdfmaker -d "outdir"
Your final PDF will be a file called out.pdf inside a folder called "out" within the folder you specified.
There are a few extra commandline options, which most people won't need to use. They are:
-picdpi X
This selects what resolution to downsample your book's illustrations to, if you have any. The default is 100dpi, which is suitable for viewing onscreen but not for printing. Use 200 or 300 for printing. It accepts the values 600, 300, 200, 150, 120, 100
-quality X
This selects the JPEG quality for illustrations. The default is 85, from a scale of 1 - 100.
Known issues
- OCR is not integrated into the script right now. That will be a version 2.0 feature.
- jbig2enc produces PDFs with an incorrect DPI value, which makes them unsuitable for OCR. This is in the process of being fixed.
- PDFMaker is Windows only. Yes, this is a bug. A multiplatform (Windows/Linux/Mac) Python rewrite will come in version 2.0