The three book scanners near the checkout desk at the PSU Millar library are somewhat difficult to use, but better than my slow USB flatbed scanner at home.
Yesterday I scanned three huge multipage files to a Brand X "Cheap on Amazon" 2GB USB flash drive. I was in a hurry, so I did not segment the files into smaller chunks, or check the files with my laptop as I made them. Bad idea. I now have a flash drive which is 60% full, but no files are listed in the directory. Either the files were too large for the scanner, or the 40 character file names were. The flash drive is formatted for VFAT16 DOS or somesuch. I hope to recover the files (if not the file names) and avoid another 90 minute, 200+ page scanning marathon. I can grep the drive image for strings; I don't see the filenames, but grep shows about 100 strings like /ProcSet [ /PDF /ImageB ] -or-f /ProcSet [ /PDF /ImageC ] and some fragments. I tried using "testdisk" tools to recover the three files; no joy. My best guess is that my overly-long scan files blew the memory buffer on the PSU scanner, and it overwrote garbage. There are signs above the scanners to "save frequently" which I ignored (https://www.xkcd.com/293/) PERHAPS SOMEONE CAN SUGGEST CLEVER TOOLS to extract the pdfs from the 1.2 gigabytes of "unlabeled something" on the flash drive. Knowing how might help me help others in the future. I expect I will only get my files by scanning them again, properly, in small chunks PSU's feeble scanners can handle. Meanwhile, "don't do that" is probably the most help I can offer to others. Keith P.S. - the best book scanner I've used was at MIT Barker Library; it images the book open 120 degrees, face up, and accomodates the natural curve of the pages. The book scanners in the Library of Congress are almost as good, but you must stretch the pages flat to get focused images. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
