The system is meant for a single scanner system where you first take photos of the left pages and then the right pages (or the other way around). In that case Homer can rename and rotate images to make a single collection of image files in the right order.
If a scanner with two cameras is used you’ll have to do that yourself. There should be a solution with a batch file (since you already have ImageMagick installed) according to http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/vie ... w&start=10 but I can’t get it to work. Might be my bad computer skills. Would be extremely nice if this was worked into Homer but it isn’t (perhaps someone who knows how it could be done could talk the guys behind Homer into including it? Or simply modify it to include it, if there's no license problems doing that).
Homer first of all provides an installer so a number of applications are easily installed. In Windows (my OS) it’s done by downloading a zip-file, un-zipping it and running an .exe file. It then installs the applications and you end up with two new icons on the desktop: One for Homer and one for ScanTailor.
The installed applications in Windows are (see homepage for details):
- ImageMagick (for manipulation images)
- Jpegtran (loseless jpeg transformation)
- JBIG2 encoder (compression tool for bi-level images)
- Tesseract-OCR
- RubyInstaller (installs the Ruby programming language)
- Hpricot (HTML parser)
- RMagick (interface between the Ruby programming language and ImageMagick)
- Pdfbeads (to create searchable PDF)
- Cmdow.exe (command-line utility used in Homer)
- ScanTailor (post-processing tool)
- Homer (command-line bash script)
ScanTailor is meant to be used as a step between renaming and rotating images and making the PDF. There’s a lot written about ScanTailor in the forums here but the tutorial video is a good starting point: http://vimeo.com/12524529
Finally you use Homer to very simply do OCR and create a PDF file.
The small tests I’ve done worked perfectly and for any beginner it’s very easy to use. Only problem is the renaming and rotating of files with a two cameras solution.