SCHOOL MAGAZINE PROJECT

HELPERS WANTED FOR SCANNING OF SCHOOL MAGAZINES!

The ultimate aim of this project is to have all of our school magazines available here in pdf format.

Further details to follow, including tips on scanning. Importantly the file size needs to be kept to a minimum for the web.

Volunteers are therefore sought for:

1) Scanning their own magazine/s
2) Scanning loaned magazines
3) Lending your magazine/s for scanning

So if you are able to and would like to help by loaning out your magazine, or by scanning yours and/or others, then please initially email me so we can discuss, and so your name can be added to the progress database below.

You can scan the magazine in sections. The 1962 magazine of 122 pages has been scanned in three sections of 2Mb each, and this was therefore easily emailed to me. I have outlined some further tips from Paul Francis which may assist also.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thank you.
Cynthia

HOW TO SCAN MAGAZINE TO PDF DOCUMENT

You can scan the magzine in sections. The 1962 magazine of 122 pages has been scanned in three sections of 2Mb each, and this was therefore easily emailed to me.

Paul Francis has also kindly offered his tips below for scanning the magazine.

Here are my instructions for scanning the Austral Magazines at home.

My Printer/Scanner is a very cheap and simple Canon Pixma MP210.

These directions would be similar for nearly all Printer/Scanners. 

Turn on your printer.
Open Printer Software ‘Canon MP Navigator’
Select Scan Photos/Documents
Select Magazine (color)
Change resolution to 200dpi (leave all other settings at default)
Place front page of magazine in scanner
Click ‘Scan’
Message comes up: “Scan completed. To continue scanning, load the next document and click ‘scan’.”
Turn over to next page, close cover and click ‘scan’

All the scanned pages will appear separately on the screen and numbered 1 to 100 etc. Click on each page to open it and you will need to crop it to remove unwanted areas. Drag the sides in to match the edges of the magazine page. Also the pages can be moved around if needed so instead of printing 1, 2 and 3, you can print 1, 3 and 2 and so on.

With any pages you feel you made a mistake, just uncheck the box next to it and it will not print.
PS: Don’t forget to crop each page to only contain the full magazine page and not a lot of empty space on the sides.
Also note, if the text on the sides is being cut off a bit, adjust the magazine page in the scanner accordingly

If the page only has black and white photos and text, select ‘Black and White’ document, also make sure to reset to 200dpi (this may reduce the size of the PDF file)
When the whole magazine is scanned, click on ‘Save as PDF’.
Save as type ‘PDF Multiple Pages’

IMPORTANT- Saving your Files!!
Under ‘File Name’ give the scanned document a name. For consistency across the board and easy identification please identify your document sections as, for example:

Example: 1968 pages 1 to 50, will become:   68_p1_50
Example: 1989 pages 25 to 45, will become:   89_p25_45
(No spaces. No dashes.)

Take note of where the scanned document will be saved to, usually in ‘My Pictures’ folder and under a sub-directory of your scanner.

Click ‘Save’.

FILE SIZE - Maximum 2Mb (2000kb)
The PDF file generated here can be quite large. I tested this on a 32 page magazine just using black and white – no colour, and it was about 25M. Since the Australs were about 150 pages and in colour, the PDF file will be huge. If anyone has the Adobe Professional Software – not just the Reader that we all have, then you can use it to reduce the size of the file.

What I did was go to this Web site that reduces the size of PDF files for free;

http://www.cvisiontech.com/

You upload your file, they compress it and then you download it back from them.

By using this site I was able to reduce the size of my PDF file to 24%, even though the quality was a bit less it was OK.

OPTIONAL

Since most people won’t have the Professional Edition of Adobe, and the file may be too huge for CVISION to handle, what I think would be better, especially since a lot of Australs began to use colour, is to take your ‘large’ scanned magazines and copy them to CDROM and mail this to Cynthia. Cynthia could then copy them and send them to people who want them. There would be time and effort, not to mention costs and postage for Cynthia, so there would need to be a fee she would charge.

That’s only if the PDF files can’t be made small enough to put up on the web…

Paul Francis