How did you put it into PDF? My question isn't about the technical side - I understand how to use Acrobat Distiller - but about making the images. Did you scan or photograph? Did you have to dissemble the book, or did you just open it flat & hope for the best? My copy of the Moeller book is pretty old and its spine will probalby break multiple times if I do that...
Luckily we have some good technology where I work. The multifunction copier is very fast, scans in colour and emails.
I did it in a couple of steps.
First I photocopied it (colour)
I opened the book flat but did try to very careful not to put too much pressure or torsion on the spine. I didn't so much as hope for the best but I tried to line up each page properly, then the following page I rotated the book to try and keep the whole book flat and supported on the scanner (it's A3 sized). I took my time and just did 20 or so pages at a time.
I had to manually go through each page, as each second page was upside down. This also allowed me to chack each page and redo any that were bad copies (although there one wobbly page and a couple with the last quarter inch missing). Boring job and I should have broken it up over more days and fixed those dodgy pages.
By photocpying it I could then do the scanning in one lot. The scanner emailed me the results but because of the size broke into 5 files. I only have Adobe Reader, but with the full version I could have made it into one file. Given that I really wanted a hard copy to work with and the scanned result to share and store a copy I didn't both combing the files. The zipped result takes up 28Mb which seems very large for the number of pages.
I had the Dave Tough book done by a copy shop and the file size is much smaller. Tjhe copy shop did the entire process for me with the Dave Tough book, but I didn't want to spend another $75 doing that.
I kept the photocopy, ran it through again to get it double sided (no degradation of the copy from what I can see) and took the end result to the copy shop for plastic covers and spiral binding ($5).
The cover was barely hanging on and came off in the process (it's with an archivist at the moment being repaired)
I would have preferred to disassemble it, and any future books I will. I was hesitant as it wasn't my own book, but in retrospect it would have been a better result and there are facilities at work to put it back together (all it would need is the right kind of stapler)
So that was the job!
Let me know if you want a copy or anymore info.
Cheers
Stuart
