Scanning a manual badly affected by damp and mould?

[Chris55000]

Can anyone give me any recommended "Vue Scan Professional" settings (I own the Full Professional Licence!) for reclaiming a manual quite badly affected by damp and black mould spots ? – Does V.S.P. have scan settings that can help with this project?

Every page of the Manual will have to be scanned and the original mould–affected paper one discarded – this was how it arrived from the seller and getting a replacement is virtually impossible – It's for an "MTL Systems Inc. Video Pattern Generator 2602A" I have that was acquired three years ago, and the Seller only found the book last week, unfortunately it seems where he kept it isn't the best environment for valuable documents like this!

Chris Williams

PS!

To borrow a phrase from Member "WME Bill", it's a "Beast of a manual!" running to over 350 pages thick!

[pmmunro]

Before trying to use scanning optimisation, would it not be a good idea to use recognised cleaning techniques used in book and document restoration and conservaion? There seems to be quite a bit of information on-line and it might be possible to speak to a local university library or museum.

At least you won't be concerned about long-term conservation if you manage to scan the manual successfully.

PMM

[Nickthedentist]

I would even try a brief dip in dilute bleach solution of one of the less important pages. It would, of course need drying and even ironing afterwards, but...

EDIT... Not sure I fancy doing that for 350 pages!

[Julesomega]

I do quite a bit of this with badly foxed documents; my usual settings are B/W Text set to the default "0.5 Threshold" but the beauty of Vue Scan is that you can vary the setting post-hoc until you get the best result. If you've already saved the image you can save it again with the new settings.

Even better, scan as "Gray", optimise the color settings, and then you can also change to B/W Text and adjust and save again

[G6Tanuki]

Pragmatically, I would scan in the highest-resolution-possible, into a digital format that innately performs no compression.

TIFF?

It may seem wasteful [you can easily generate a 5Mb TIFF from a single A4 page] but you then have a load of options to digitally-restore it. There are 'free' image-manipulation sites out there where you can upload your scans and use cloud-storage/compute-horsepower to experiment.

There are even AI/Expert-Systems in the cloud that can be worth playing with.

[trh01uk]

I am not sure which VueScan settings you want to vary. I would scan at a minimum of 300 dpi, but maybe doubling that to 600dpi, if you have any very fine detail that is lost at 300dpi. Determine that by trial and error of course!

The only other critical setting for black and white documents is the "black/white threshold". This is the point at which a grey pixel switches from black to white - and it can only be determined by trial and error again.

When it comes to file formats, I've always found "TIFF with Group 4 compression" to be the best for black and white documents. But you need to make sure the document truly is set to "black and white", or "1-bit".

Hope that helps.


Richard

[GMB]

One thing that no-one mentions: if you can slightly see the back of page showing through you should use a black background on the scanner. This swamps out the text and makes final processing easier.

[Jon_G4MDC]

That's a good tip GMB! I do have trouble with that.

[trh01uk]

And by the way "damp and black mould spots" can be simply erased in many photo editing programs. I use Abbyy Finereader to obtain a clean document after scanning, but there are other programs which will do the same job. XnView for instance is free of charge for personal use.


Richard

[WME_bill]

Re: Scanning a manual badly affected by damp and mould?
Can I raise another problem with damp manuals. The pages are stuck together in patches. How does one separate the sheets so that I can scan them.
I have a rare Philips manual which is desperate. Could I try soaking the whole bunch of pages for a time. But then the risk is that the paper itself will break up.
Also the printing ink appears to be on the starch/china clay surface coating, so soaking will dissolve that away completely.
wme_bill

[trh01uk]

Originally Posted by WME_bill

Re: Scanning a manual badly affected by damp and mould?
Can I raise another problem with damp manuals. The pages are stuck together in patches. How does one separate the sheets so that I can scan them.
I have a rare Philips manual which is desperate. Could I try soaking the whole bunch of pages for a time. But then the risk is that the paper itself will break up.
Also the printing ink appears to be on the starch/china clay surface coating, so soaking will dissolve that away completely.
wme_bill

Bill,

I imagine your Philips manual has all its pages stuck together. If so, you have nothing to lose by dunking the manual in water for a period, to see whether that frees up the pages, so that they can be very carefully prised apart. The worst that will happen is that the paper will disintegrate and/or the ink will dissolve. But doesn't sound much worse than what you have already!

Richard

[Nickthedentist]

Originally Posted by WME_bill

Re: Scanning a manual badly affected by damp and mould?
Can I raise another problem with damp manuals. The pages are stuck together in patches. How does one separate the sheets so that I can scan them.
I have a rare Philips manual which is desperate. Could I try soaking the whole bunch of pages for a time. But then the risk is that the paper itself will break up.
Also the printing ink appears to be on the starch/china clay surface coating, so soaking will dissolve that away completely.
wme_bill

Steam?

[wireman]

Originally Posted by GMB

One thing that no-one mentions: if you can slightly see the back of page showing through you should use a black background on the scanner. This swamps out the text and makes final processing easier.

If only I had known that before. I suppose this gives you hassle if you want to take the final scan to the very edge.