Emerald Dragon Manual and Related Scans?

[shawnji]

I've poked around for these a bit to no avail.  I'm curious if anyone knows of a site with an existing copy of some decent to high-quality scans.  I'm interested in translating some of these as a pet project.  I'm particularly looking for scans of the map and bonus booklet included with the game (though I don't expect I'll get that lucky).  Thanks!  I'm debating doing it myself, but I'm not too excited about ruining the binding on my copy of the Dengeki-Ou guide book unless I can find an extra copy somewhere else.  There's also the small problem of not having access to a scanner...

EDIT: Okay, I'm just going to go ahead and do this myself since I don't think anyone else has ever gotten to these.  I'm gonna' hit up Akihabara this weekend and see if I can pick up another guide book for cheap to rip apart.  Let me just ask, though; anybody have a good recommendation for a cheap scanner that will scan at an acceptable resolution?  I'd like something that doesn't take up a huge amount space, since my apartment's kinda' on the small side.

[esteban]

I can only offer support and encouragement for your project: yes, it sounds great  .

Good luck.

[shawnji]

Thanks! I figure that even if I don't get around to translating them, just having the scans up online will be a boon to anyone who might want to work on them later.

[vestcoat]

Any modern scanner will scan at high resolutions.  Stand-alone units seem to be more reliable than all-in-one printers, with their waste chips and other mysterious problems.

[shawnji]

Cool.  I picked up a cheap scanner in Akihabara along with an extra copy of the guide.  I spent the last hour or so removing the binding; now I just need to know what a good DPI to scan these at would be.  I'll probably just zip them up uncompressed as bitmaps, so whatever will give the best detail while not using up an obscene amount of space would be good...  Recommendations?

[SuperPlay]

When I scan magazines I have:


Preparations:

1) Picked a random magazine

2) I opened the staples and then carefully removed all of the pages.  This was not one of the bound spines magazines as a lot of the later ones are.

3) Make plenty of coffee :@)


Scanning:

I used a Canon LIDE 100 and the inbuilt scanner driver that comes with windows 7 set to:

500DPI: As the Windows driver does not perform de-screening 500 dpi reduces the crazing effect

TIFF file format: Each image was saved as a TIFF as you can perform multiple editing actions / saves to this file type with minimal/no quality loss.  Each page was around 60MB.

I used a piece of black card between the folded page to reduce bleeding from the reverse side of the page.


Once each page was scanned I used photoshop to:

* Rotate the pages to the correct orientation
* Straighten up the scans
* Crop the images to size

I then used a photoshop batch job to:

* Reduce the resolution to 300DPI
* Save as JPG (Quality Level 1 - Low)

Last but not least I then used Adobe Acrobat pro to create the PDF using the default settings.

[shawnji]

Thank you, sir!  I think I've settled on scanning at 300 DPI, though.  I've only gotten a few images scanned so far.  The binding on this one was done with glue so I had to use a hairdryer to soften it up... (-_-; )  I'm scanning directly into Photoshop to clean things up including removal of glue that couldn't be taken off without physically ripping the page.  There is some very light bleed-through.  I tried to reduce it, but I couldn't seem to get it to work without getting bleed-through of whatever color background I tried to use.  It doesn't really ruin the image, though; so I guess I'll just live with it for now.  The biggest issue is that there are almost 100 pages worth of material here.

If someone would like to scan these at a higher resolution after I've finished doing my attempt I'd be glad to mail all the pages and what-not for you to use; just let me know if you're interested.