Articles

I've added several new features to my OpenStreetMap printing tool, called render(myMap), but never mentioned it in this blog before. You can find some info in my references page or read on.

For best results from my bookscanner, I started using the DjVu format, which is designed for scanned books. I've collected a lot of useful information, so I decided to publish that as a small info website, in Hungarian: www.djvu.hu

Exisitng editors for text data DjVu files are quite limited, like for example DjVuSmooth. So I've implemented a new editor in JavaScript, that allows editing both the strucutre of the text (paragraphs, lines, words,...) and the coordinates of the text boxes by simply dragging with the mouse, features like create, delete, merge are also available.

There are many challenges with my DIY bookscanner. I plan to document them sometime... The biggest modification was to replace the plexi glass with the top part of a scanner, because the plexi was very much scratched after a few books. Spreading the light with a semi-transparent cover near to the lamp was also necessary.

Most annoying of all problems was the barrel distortion of the camera.  This made the whole equipment no competition to the flatbed scans of old books that are already scanned, that I also plan to scan to improve quality.

I've added some improvements to the openstretmap.hu website:

• PlanetPlanet news aggregator
• Ability to search multiple POIs (e.g. bank & atm, or when shop type does not matter, you just need some food)
• Added a name-less business card created by a professional designer
• Coordinates supported in search box

And of some minor improvements, mainly in usabilty of search box, and updated street autocomplete database.

Hungarian version of this article is available on djvu.hu

To explain this book scanner idea in a few words, compared to traditional flatbed scanners or special flatbed book scanners:

• 90 degree holder plate for the book
• no need to push the book
• no need to disassemble the book
• built from cheap leftover material
• scanning with a compact photo camera
• no wait for a flatbed scanner to move across a page slooooooooowly

There is an excellent community for building home made book scanners. By following the guides on diybookscanner.org it's easy to build your own scanner, that can scan a 300 pages book in 30 minutes. After 1.5 hours postprocessing work (in ScanTailor) you'll have very good black & white TIF images, that are straight, cleaned from noise, well readable. (No OCR or single-file conversion is included in this time frame.)

Each book in my Commodore Book List has been extended with links to two major Hungarian antique book stores:

• regikonyvek.hu
• antikvarium.hu

Have you ever had the problem that your camera's date was misset or reset, so all your EXIF and file dates were broken?

In this case you need to adjust the date in several images and preferably alter the file date accordingly. This is much easier than you thought, two simple commands using Linux tool exiv2.

I've updated the openstreetmap.hu website with some new features and new page layout. New features inlcude:

• Autocomplete for Hungarian city names and streets
• Remember last viewed position
• Nice GUI using jQuery UI framework
• Directly controll JOSM from "Edit in JOSM" menu
• Improve "Send to" by e-mail field and URL copy field and better "Add marker"

The www.openstreetmap.hu domain was occupied by an empty HTML file for years. Recently I discovered it is free, so registered it immediately. Let's see if someone will complain.

Update: The old owner of the domain is happy with the new site. :-)

With help of an OSM-JS professional, we got the new site up & running in a few days  - thank you mate!