ImageStudy
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Preface
I was recently faced with the problem of taking images of a document taken on a cell phone and creating a printable document with the maximum resolution of the copied text(1). I felt that the process of processing the images was of sufficient interest to document it.
C O N T E N T S
1 Introduction
In reading this document, Familiarity with the STF Syntax Summary is assumed. (Download document PDF)
2 Process
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The first step was to use GIMP(2) to take each page and split it into two or three sub-images. Care was exercised to trim as much white space as possible. The result was 27 images to be stretched to fit a page to be included in the correct order.
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Because each sub-image was named by document paragraph, the images appeared in sorted order.
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A dos shell window was opened(3).
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Next a Windows dir/b command(4) displayed the file names in the correct order.
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Another Windows trick is: Right-click in the upper left corner of the shell window and select Mark. Then drag the cursor over the desired text, highlighting it. Then press enter (or right-click again.) This was used to copy the file names to the paste buffer in sorted order(5)
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An STF document was created and the file names pasted into it.
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The next step was to reference each file in a .Figure command. The XEmacs macro facility was used to modify the text, as described in Nuances In Computing, to change each text line containing a file name to .Figure 'Image-name',,Sec 'Image-name'. This included each image as a figure into the document and added an entry to the list of figures.
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At the same time that XEmacs was used to insert the .Figure commands, it was also used to insert a paragraph command (.hl 1, Figures) after every five .Figure commands. The reason for this is LaTeX has a limitation in that if too many figures are inserted into a paragraph, it barfs and generates an error; and the desired output was a PDF document, so LaTeX was required.
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The next consideration was to use landscape mode. This would provide the maximum image magnification. This was accomplished by commanding STF to insert a landscape command at the start (and end) of each paragraqph, as follows:
.PS 1,\landscape{begin}
.pe F, 1, \landscape{end} -
Since it was desired to have as much document real estate devoted to images as possible, the document margins were changed to 5 mm; and the images were set to fill the page.The document source appeared as shown below:
.pc |
3 Comments
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The .pc command means to insert the following text at the end of the preamble section. Since this is only applicable to LaTeX, it is enclosed in a conditional, limiting its applicability to LaTeX.
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The .sf D command sets the image size to span the page and stop when the vertical or horizontal dimension hits a margin. See Working With Images in the STF documentation.It took longer to describe, than do; but hopefully it is instructive. As an aside, it is difficult to insert 27 images into a word processor. As involved as the above process seems, it is a sanity saver compared to trying to do it using a word processor.
F O O T N O T E S
(1) Someone wanted help understanding a section and this was the only way available to provide it.
(2) GNU Image Processing Program, https://www.gimp.org/
(3) One way to open a shell in Windows is to create a bat file with cmd in it, say 0dos.bat. Then double click 0Dos.bat
