ScanTailor Advanced

Fantastic tool for scanning books into pdfs

A great app to digitize books, there is an advanced version of the program : scantailor advanced. It fixes bugs from the original program

ScanTailor is a promising open source app for deskewing scanned images; for example, to straighten a scanned book page image so that the lines of text are horizontal. Indeed, ScanTailor is able to do that automatically quite well. I tried it on a scanned book project that had 180 scanned pages. All pages came out deskewed properly. However - and this is the fatal problem - it trims away parts of the image as it deskews, and if you continue with its mandatory processing steps, it trims and hacks the pages into bits. There are no overrides to stop it doing this. So basically it cannot be used to scan a book and create a neat digital copy, because the head of the page canvas will be trimmed off to the top of the first line of text, and any photographs bleeding beyond the text block will be trimmed (and the page canvas as well). It also arbitrarily adds white space to the page foot. These are things that of course you want control over, but you can't stop it doing this. I guess if you manually controlled each page you could get a good result, but when you have hundreds of pages, you want an automatic tool, working on each page on-by-one isn't viable. It's such a pity that ScanTailor goes feral on the images after deskewing, because the deskew function itself works so well and so automatically. But in the end, I found it to be an app that I couldn't use.

Hopeless. I don't doubt that buried in the code are some great algorithms. But the interface insists on just doing its own thing. You try and set your options in the dialog boxes, and it just changes everything back to the defaults when you 'ok'. I just tried ST again after years of avoiding it (due to its many problems), because I could see that someone updated it around 2018 (to "ScanTailor Advanced") and thought I'd give it another go. Wasted 2 or 3 hours trying to get it to process 750 color scan page images. It wants to convert them all to monochrome. No way to stop it doing that, even when you select all pages and apply the color setting. Nope, it just changes back to b&w. What a mess. So, just as bad as the original ScanTailor. Why oh why can't some clever person fork it on Github, cut away all the junk code and just make it a deskewer that doesn't muck up everything else.

Why the creators of this software thought that the six different processing steps should be interdependent of each other, making it compulsory for the user to go through all of them, beats me. If I could use the batch deskew function alone, this would be a godsend. But to have to go through four or five other batch processes ALL THE TIME, which, again, require several individual settings EVERY TIME, this borders on torture.

Very useful in fixing up scans,to make them more legible.

Almost complete all-in one solution for digitizing books in a automatic way! Thanks for creators of this unbelievable app!