Questions about the creation of the Museum's Color HP-41C Owner's Handbook

[Craig Bladow]

On close inspection of the color HP-41C manual included on the Museum flash drive, it is much more than just a scan. Does anyone know what the steps of the process were to generate this great reference document?

It appears that images were scanned and placed in the document, text converted to certain fonts (which fonts?) and even button graphics were somehow layered over text, making the buttons searchable!

Kudos to whoever created this!

[Gene222]

I am not sure of how the pdf manual was created, but when comparing it to the original, it looks like it was scanned on a flat bed color scanner. The covers appear to have been removed from the binding and scanned separately. I don't know if the interior pages were also removed from the binding. The interior odd pages appear to have been scanned in one batch, and then the binding hole punches were trimmed off all of the odd pages by a computer program. The same appears to have been done for the even pages. Once you have the odd and even pages trimmed, you can use a computer program or file name batch editor to rename all of the pages so that when the file names are in alphabetical order, the odd and even pages are also in order. A computer program is used to create a single pdf document where the pages are all in order. (I could be wrong. The person could have scanned the pages in order and trimmed each page separately. I hope the person did not physically trim the pages and run them through a scanner with a document feeder.) These book scanning programs can perform optical character recognition, OCR, or another program like Adobe Standard can perform OCR to the pdf document. When you OCR a pdf document, the digital text is placed over the optical text. The OCR process is not perfect. If you inspect the digital text, you will see some spelling errors, such as "the" appears as "th e". One can edit the digital text to correct spelling errors, but that is a lot of work and rarely done. Somebody then went through the trouble of bookmarking all of the sections and chapters in the pdf document. In any event, it is a lot of work to scan a manual in this way.

3/29/19. A lot of these scanning functions, like OCR, trimming, file naming, and merging functions, are included in today's modern printer-scanners, but not the batch processing.