[Simh] best way to scan 172 column fanfold 80s printout?

Sun Feb 11 13:11:16 EST 2018

Yes it comes up time and again, and book scanning projects only work so well.

which is why I wondered what people thought of turning an old DEC teletype or printer into a scanner, by fixing a camera to it,
you could even start by turning pages manually.
at least the tractor feed would hold the pages evenly.
you could even just use a hand held camera with the right lighting.

light tables and other things too, or just put it on a table and photo each page.
no matter how you slice it, tedious.

zork vms is 6 inches thick, it's no wonder i've never tried it...

Dan.
________________________________
From: Simh <simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com> on behalf of Timothe Litt <litt at ieee.org>
Sent: February 11, 2018 12:45 PM
To: simh at trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] best way to scan 172 column fanfold 80s printout?

These opportunities keep coming up; lots of us archived paper, which survives longer than magnetics - and their transports.

These seem to be addressed as one-off projects.  It would be more efficient if a group of interested people could develop/find a sponsor for a listing -> code facility.  But that may be just a dream.

Scanning paper efficiently requires an investment.  This would seem to be something that could best be centralized (or regionalized).  Al Kossow (chm/bitsavers) has hardware for efficiently scanning manuals, but I don't know if it handles 11 x 17 (line printer) pages.  But he's not centrally located - and the really scarce resource is labor.

Scanning code is a bit different from scanning books.  Listings tend to have headers, footers, (tractor feed holes), notations - in some cases, assembly code or other columns - separate from the code.  Plus lines and/or colored bars.  And while the font will be consistent & monospace, ribbons don't always produce crisp impressions.  They fade; the paper isn't acid-free; zero and O aren't interchangeable, and spaces matter.  You want to end up with code that can be compiled - with minimal manual intervention.  So you will want to be able OCR the result, without a lot of fixups.  And you need to be able to either select the desired source code, or reliably post-process to extract it.  So getting every character (including spaces) right matters, and skew that might be tolerated in a book becomes a problem with listings.  On the other hand, if the tractor feed holes haven't been detached, it ought to be possible to adapt a printer as a pretty good transport.  Printers like the DEC LA120 have the necessary stepping motors, optical encoders, power, and are microprocessor controlled.  Some line printers have 4 tractor drives, which can hold paper flatter than the 2 of serial printers.  But these are more power hungry and a bit more work to adapt.

In any case, the problem is that building something efficient is a Project; it would be really useful in the grand scheme of things.  But for any one recovery, it always seems better to just stumble along with something ad-hoc. So local optimization, as often is the case, wins over global.

Here are some starting points from the book world:

https://www.diybookscanner.org
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/diy-book-scanning-is-easier-than-you-think/
https://www.wired.com/2010/04/the-20-diy-book-scanner/
https://makezine.com/projects/make-41-tinkering-toys/diy-book-scanner/
http://scantailor.org
https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scanner-vacuum-diy

P.S. I once worked in a very small company; cash was short.  We used each sheet of printer paper four times, and never burst it.  Front and back, of course.  But it turns out that most of our listings were left-skewed.  So turning the paper up-side down and printing the right side was adequate for working listings.  There was minimal overlap.  I wouldn't want to scan those :-)

On 11-Feb-18 11:18, Pär Moberg wrote:
Look at the diy book scanning community for inspiration and make sure that the light comes at an angle that doesn't reflect in to the camera.
I just found a led light fixture that pumps out as lot of light and is long as a "tube light" 1,2m (approximately 1,5 yards)
//Pär

Den 11 feb. 2018 5:09 PM skrev "Zane Healy" <healyzh at avanthar.com<mailto:healyzh at avanthar.com>>:
On Feb 11, 2018, at 6:55 AM, Dan Gahlinger <dgahling at hotmail.com<mailto:dgahling at hotmail.com>> wrote:

I have several printouts like this,
the one I was just trying to scan in is labelled "EMPIRE Version 4.0 18-Jan-81"
with the notice: "Please send bug reports to ELROND::EMPIRE"
This is a Vax/VMS Fortran conversion from TOPS-10/20 from sources from around fall 1979
It seems I only have the first 95 pages of this printout
and it's folded width-wise, making scanning more difficult, old folds are hard to get out.

I also have Zork (Vax/VMS) and of course several different iterations of Trek7 (Vms)
somewhere I have a copy of Adventure (Colossal Cave) and the "Castle" game I love so much.

so I guess question 1: how best to get rid of the folds? my method so far: fold them the other direction and try and fold it out, but so far not much luck
and 2: how best to scan 100s of wide fanfold printout pages?

I wish someone in Toronto had converted an old teletype and put a camera on it, that would be brilliant!

Dan.

The best way might be a piece of glass (to keep the paper flat), a copy stand, and a high-MP DSLR.  Lighting in that situation would be… interesting.  I’m not sure how much a polarizer on the lens would help.  One option might be to put it on a light table, but I think that would create an interesting/unreadable mess.  Actually less light might be better, and simply go with longer exposures.

There are graphic arts scanners that will do large pages, but in the art reproduction world, the method above (normally minus the glass), is more normal.  You’re lucky, you’re looking to copy something that doesn’t need to be 1200dpi or better.  I know you can get up to at least 12x18 range with a scanner.  I’m currently looking for either one of these, or ideally a drum scanner capable of handling 11x14 negatives.  Right now the only way I have to get a digital copy of photo’s taken with my 11x14 camera, is to photograph the prints.

Zane

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