[Ohiodig] "Jellification" of Text

[Noah Stegman Rechtin]

Dear All,

For reference, I used the term "jellification" because the results look
like jelly to me for some reason. However, a more technical way to describe
it might be "a blurry background with heavily non-anti-aliased text".

The "jellified" version takes significantly longer to open than the normal
one. It could be the result of the former attempting to open the entire
document at once while the latter only displays two pages at a time, but it
might also be related to the viewer attempting to render an additional
layer of poorly OCR'd text.

Why not write to Ideals and ask?
>
I can't believe I didn't think of doing that. I just sent them an email
about it. Good suggestion.

On a related or unrelated note, here is an older post from a digitization
> expert (
> https://page2pixel.org/2013/08/when-copiers-arent-copying-as-they-should/)
> that mentions copy/scan stations interpreting numbers incorrectly and
> changing them in derivatives.
>
If you click through to the linked blog post
<http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning>
and
the provided examples really do look like the above. So it does indeed
appear related. Thanks for the excellent link.

The concern he lays out for accurate replication is well taken. While
whatever mechanism does this has not, in my experience, caused issues with
*text*, many of the documents I encounter (e.g. Technical Manuals
<http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006125802>) have diagrams or
schematics that it fails to correctly reproduce. For the subject matter our
museum deals with, this is important. (For example, while it's not the same
cause, the difference between microfilmed and scanned originals
<http://www.aircorpsaviation.com/ken-jungeberg-collection> can be drastic.)
Being able to see the minutiae can often be the difference between being
able to reproduce something correctly or not. I know this is all a bit of
preaching to the choir, but I mention it because it seems that
the digitizer may simply not be aware that the drawings are present because
the document appears so text heavy.

Sincerely,
Noah Stegman Rechtin
*Tri-State Warbird Museum <http://tri-statewarbirdmuseum.org/>*
*Collections Manager & Museum Attendant*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.library.ohio.gov/pipermail/ohiodig/attachments/20220601/cae37ddb/attachment-0001.htm>