Post something about yourself here (The Hello Thread)

[Misty]

Welcome, Margaret! Nice to see someone from U of T here - I'm a FIS grad. I'm very interested in your project, and I'll be very curious to see how your project thread goes. You're looking at making portable scanners?

[strider1551]

Greeting all. My name is Adam, and I'm a seminary student studying to be a Catholic priest (5.5 years down, 3.5 to go). My hope is to keep digital copies of some of the more significant books I read in my courses - giving me quick access to my entire library and being able to do text searches of it with beagle. There's also a huge collection of early Christian writings in our seminary library put together by Migne (I think in the 1800's?) that really should be preserved.

I just want to say that this forum is an amazing resource and community. I've been using Scan Tailor for about half a year to clean up the copies of articles we get for class. I started wondering if there was anything that could correct page warping or keystoning when I found the thread here on Scan Tailor and the dewarping algorithm in progress. Over this past week of spring break I tossed a board against a wall at a 90 degree angle, setup a tripod, found a random piece of clear stiff plastic, and have produced two excellent digital copies of some books I use. My plan is to build something a bit more respectable when summertime comes around.

Other than that, I'm a linux user (gentoo) and fairly competent with python. Perhaps at some point I'll find a way to contribute to the software end, but for right now I'm just looking forward to keeping up with all the discussions here.

[daniel_reetz]

Welcome -- and thanks for the link to Beagle, it looks really neat. Benjamin Varadi has taken the initiative to start up a LiveCD -- he requested opinions and discussionhere. If you have anything to offer as a Linux guy, that would be great!

[Margism]

Hi Misty, yes, in fact I am just writing up a thread in the hardware section, let's connect over there.

[aplumb3000]

Hi. My name is Andy. I work as an IT pro at a big 10 university. I love all kinds of fabrication (metal/wood/composites) as well as a bit of programming on the side (vbscript, python, and java). I built a scanner based on some of the ideas posted on this site for a friend. I found the examples and pictures provided by this community quite helpful. I plan on submitting my scanner write-up in the hardware section. For now see:
http://apmodtech.blogspot.com

Thank you ALL for your contributions and sharing!

-AP

[daniel_reetz]

Great work, and thanks for dropping by! Can't wait to see your thread over in Hardware!

[flickertail]

Hi, my name is Aaron. I know Dan from school, but I'm a different Aaron.

Anyway, after seeing Dan's presentation, I've got a bug to build a book scanner.

[koulevprime]

Hi guys, I'm Tori. I am currently a Computer Science and Mathematics undergraduate at Missouri S&T, and I am also an (inactive) developer of the ScanTailor project. I haven't done anything for the software yet; I'm still familiarizing myself with the source code to date. I'm also working on a proper English-translation for the documentation available (most of the English documents are just straight-Russian translations ).

I'm still quite new to the forums (as you can tell by my post count), so it might be a while before I get up-to-date with what has been brainstormed, what has been proposed, and what has been implemented. I am definitely interested in following the Page-calibration and auto dewarping discussed here (Want to help me with an algorithm? by rob).

I'll see what I can read up on in the forums to get myself familiarized with what's going on. My interests in Computer Science is definitely towards Machine Vision, with a special giddiness towards OCR techniques. I would absolutely love to collaborate with some members working on pre-processing techniques to produce a workable image from a crummy image (like heavy warping, exposure variation, and poor lighting).

My skills:

• I've only used Linux for a little under two years, so I haven't messed with much under the hood.
• Perl, Bash, Windows BATCH Scripting (ugh).
• Basic HTML, JavaScript, CSS. I'm intending on learning more, as well as PHP and Ruby on Rails.
• My computer science classes have taken me so far to Data Structures (if that gives you a hint at where I am at being able to design algorithms and software).
• I love Video production, and I love writing Tutorials and HOWTOs. Hit me up if you'd like to make one, or the other, or a combination of the three!
• You cannot drink my milkshake. Your straw is not long enough.

How I would like to help:

• Forums are good for verbose, technical discussions. They are horrible for someone new to find documentation. I hope to digest some of the forum discussions, and formalize them into the Wiki, or some other place yet to be classified.
• I attend a Science and Engineering University, so if anybody needs access to Research papers behind paywalls, let me know. I would gladly consult my library and other resources.
• If somebody has something they want to say, but they don't know how to teach very well, I would be willing to collaborate with you to write up official documentation. I ask questions, you answer them, and ...*poof*... DOCUMENTATION!

[daniel_reetz]

Tori, your timing couldn't be any better. Welcome!

I'm producing a next-generation scanner hardware tutorial. The idea is to bring some of the better hardware ideas from the forum into a concrete form usable by people who haven't read every.last.post. As far as your points about the forum and documentation, I couldn't agree more.

I am willing to install any wiki/CMS/do whatever to help make the documentation process good for you and everyone else. If, in the fullness of time, you're interested in having more control over the wiki/whatever, I can hook you up with a shell account.

[koulevprime]

Tori, your timing couldn't be any better. Welcome!

I'm producing a next-generation scanner hardware tutorial. The idea is to bring some of the better hardware ideas from the forum into a concrete form usable by people who haven't read every.last.post. As far as your points about the forum and documentation, I couldn't agree more.

I am willing to install any wiki/CMS/do whatever to help make the documentation process good for you and everyone else. If, in the fullness of time, you're interested in having more control over the wiki/whatever, I can hook you up with a shell account.

Sounds like an awesome idea! I would definitely be interested in helping with the tutorial compilation. First, let me say you did an amazing job with the original tutorial. The distributed humor made it much more entertaining to read than just a boring tutorial (even better when it is highly unexpected).

Let me browse the forum and get an understanding of this project's current progress. If you know of any threads that should be traversed with a higher priority, go ahead and PM me the thread URLs. Feel free to poke me if I remain quiet for too long.