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ScanTailor Advanced

The ScanTailor version that merges the features of the ScanTailor Featured and ScanTailor Enhanced versions, brings new ones and fixes.

<u>Contents</u>:

• Description
• Features
  • ScanTailor Enhanced
    • Auto margins [improved]
    • Page detect [reworked]
    • Deviation [reworked]
    • Picture shape [reworked]
    • Multi column thumbnails view [reworked]
  • ScanTailor Featured
    • ScanTailor Featured fixes & improvements
    • Line vertical dragging on dewarp
    • Square picture zones [reworked]
    • Auto save project [optimized]
    • Quadro Zoner [reworked]
    • Marginal dewarping
  • ScanTailor Universal
    • ScanTailor Universal fixes & improvements
  • ScanTailor Advanced
    • ScanTailor Advanced fixes & improvements
    • Light and Dark color schemes
    • Multi-threading support for batch processing
    • Full control over settings on output
    • Filling outside areas
    • Tiff compression
    • Adaptive binarization
    • Splitting output
    • Original background
    • Color segmenter and posterization
    • Rectangular picture shape
    • New zone interaction modes
    • Saving zoom and focus on switching output tabs
    • Measurement units system
    • Status bar panel
    • Default parameters
    • Collapsible filter options
    • Auto adjusting content area
    • Black on white detection
    • Guides
• Building

Description

ScanTailor is an interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages. It performs operations such as:

• page splitting,
• deskewing,
• adding/removing borders,
• selecting content
• ... and others.

You give it raw scans, and you get pages ready to be printed or assembled into a PDF or DjVu file. Scanning, optical character recognition, and assembling multi-page documents are out of scope of this project.

Features

ScanTailor Enhanced

• Auto margins [improved]

  Auto margins feature allows keep page content on original place. In the Margins step you can choose from Auto, Manual (default) and Original mode. The manual mode is the original one. Auto mode try to decide if it is better to align page top, bottom or center. Original mode keeps page on their vertical original position.

  This feature has been improved. See page area feature description. Also see ScanTailor Advanced fixes & improvements

• Page detect [reworked]

  Page detect feature allows detect page in black margins or switch off page content detection and keep original page layout.

  This feature has been reworked. See ScanTailor Advanced fixes & improvements for more information.

• Deviation [reworked]

  Deviation feature enables highlighting of different pages. Highlighted in red are pages from Deskew filter with too high skew, from Select Content filter pages with different size of content and in Margins filter are highlighted pages which does not match others.

  This feature has been reworked. See ScanTailor Advanced fixes & improvements for more information.

• Picture shape [reworked]

  Picture shape feature adds option for mixed pages to choose from free shape and rectangular shape images. This patch does not improve the original algoritm but creates from the detected "blobs" rectangular shapes and the rectangles that intersects joins to one.

  This feature has been reworked. See rectangular picture shape feature description.

• Multi column thumbnails view [reworked]

  This allows to expand and un-dock thumbnails view to see more thumbnails at a time.

  This feature had performance and drawing issues and has been reworked.

ScanTailor Featured

• ScanTailor Featured fixes & improvements

  • Deleted 3 Red Points.
    The 3 central red points on the topmost (bottom-most) horizontal blue line of the dewarping mesh are now eliminated.
  • Manual dewarping mode auto switch.
    The dewarping mode is now set to MANUAL (from OFF) after the user has moved the dewarping mesh.
  • Auto dewarping vertical half correction.
    This patch corrects the original auto-dewarping in half the cases when it fails. If the vertical content boundary angle (calculated by auto-dewarping) exceeds an empirical value (2.75 degrees from vertical), the patch adds a new point to the distortion model (with the coordinates equal to the neighboring points) to make this boundary vertical. The patch works ONLY for the linear end of the top (bottom) horizontal line of the blue mesh (and not for the opposite curved end).

• Line vertical dragging on dewarp

  You can move the topmost (bottom-most) horizontal blue line of the dewarping mesh up and down as a whole - if you grab it at the most left (right) red point - holding down the CTRL key.

• Square picture zones [reworked]

  You can create the rectangular picture zones - holding down the CTRL key. You can move the (rectangular) picture zones corners in an orthogonal manner - holding down the CTRL key.

  This feature has been reworked and is now a part of new zone interaction modes feature.

• Auto save project [optimized]

  Set the "auto-save project" checked in the Settings menu and you will get your project auto-saved provided you have originally saved your new project. Works at the batch processing too.

  This feature had performance issues and has been optimized.

• Quadro Zoner [reworked]

  Another rectangular picture zone shape. This option is based on Picture shape, Square picture zones. It squeezes every Picture shape zone down to the real rectangular picture outline and then replaces it (the resulting raster zone) by a vector rectangular zone, so that a user could easily adjust it afterwards (by moving its corners in an orthogonal manner).

  This feature has been reworked. See rectangular picture shape feature description.

• Marginal dewarping

  An automatic dewarping mode. Works ONLY with such raw scans that have the top and bottom curved page borders (on the black background). It automatically sets the red points of the blue mesh along these borders (to create a distortion model) and then dewarps the scan according to them. Works best on the low-curved scans.

Note: Other features of this version, such as Export, Dont_Equalize_Illumination_Pic_Zones, Original_Foreground_Mixed has't been moved due to dirty realization. Their functionality is fully covered by full control over settings on output and splitting output features.

ScanTailor Universal

• ScanTailor Universal fixes & improvements

  • Improvements for the thumbnail view.
    1. More accurate multi-column list handling.
    2. Scaling thumbnails via Alt+Wheel.
  • Fixed some bugs of official and Enhanced version.

<a name="scantailor-advanced-features"></a> ScanTailor Advanced

• ScanTailor Advanced fixes & improvements

  • Portability.
    The settings and program files are stored in the folder with the application.
    Note: If installed into a system directory, where config and data files can't be written into the folder with the application executable, ScanTailor Advanced works as a standalone app and stores its settings and application data in the appropriate system specific paths.

  • Page splitting settings now influence on the output by filling offcut. Fill offcut option has been added.

  • Page layout and all the other views now consider splitting settings. Corresponding improvements are done for thumbnails.

  • Changed ScanTailor behavior on page split stage.

    1. Reworked apply cut feature. Now on applying cut to the pages with different dimensions than the page the cut applied to, ScanTailor tries to adapt cutters instead of fully rejecting the cut setting and switching to auto mode for those pages as it was before. The later was annoying as pages could be similar and had the difference in a few pixels.
    2. Added check to reject invalid cut settings in manual mode.
    3. UI: Added cutters interaction between each other. They can't more intersect each other, which created a wrong page layout configuration before.

  • Reworking on multi column thumbnails view feature from ver. Enhanced. Now thumbnails are shown evenly.

  • Added option to control highlighting the thumbnails of pages with high deviation with red asterisks. The option refreshes the thumbnails instantly.

  • Deviation feature reworked.

    1. A deviation provider implemented.
       It supports caching and recalculates the values on demand. There isn't more any necessity to store deviation in page parameters and so in the project file, that approach caused some problems as the deviation is not actually a page parameter and depends on all the pages in the project.
    2. Added sorting by decreasing deviation.

  • Page/content boxes and auto margins features fixes & improvements.

    1. Added a feature of dragging both content and page areas by using Shift+LMB combination.
    2. A page box implementation reworked. Now it's interactive and can be adjusted by the same way as a content box is done.
    3. The page rectangle does not require refreshing page and won't be reset on the content area changes.
    4. Implemented applying the page/content boxes to the other pages automatically correcting the position of the boxes.
    5. Added width and height parameters to regulate the page box size in manual mode.
    6. Auto margins option has been moved out of the alignment settings and does no more force to use only the original layout.
    7. Auto margins feature now considers page box changes made at the selection content stage.
    8. Other bug fixes and improvements.

  • Auto and original alignment modes reworked:

    1. The original and auto alignment modes didn't work correctly due to the error in code.
    2. Both the modes didn't work rightly after select content stage or reopening the project file, always requiring secondary batch processing of every page at margins stage to work correctly.
    3. Reworked calculation method for the original alignment. Now it is more precise.
    4. Original alignment mode now considers the page box from 4th stage.
    5. Fixed behaviour of horizontal alignment, when the original mode enabled, and auto margins has been enabled/disabled. Also on applying auto-margins / original alignment to the set of pages, that is now set correctly for each page.
    6. Added ability to separately control vertical and horizontal automatic alignment when auto or original alignment mode enabled.

  • Changed the way of the adjustment of the despeckle strength.
    Now that's set via the slider. It allows to adjust the despeckle strength more smoothly and exactly. Value 1.0 matches the old cautious mode, 2.0 - normal and 3.0 - aggressive.

  • Improvements on the thumbnails view and navigation:

    • Saving selection of pages on filter switch.
    • Separate highlighting for selection leader in thumbnails.
    • Navigating between selected pages. Use Shift+PgUp/Q and Shift+PgDown/W to navigate between selected pages.
    • Added buttons to navigate between pages.
    • Multi page selection mode without using keyboard.
    • The question as to whether cancel multi page selection.
    • Go to a page by its number (Ctrl+G shortcut).

  • Added options in the settings to manage the quality and size of thumbnails.
    It's possible to switch thumbnail quality while working on a project with the changes applied immediately. For every quality chosen a cache is created.
    Usage example: you could use this feature for the preview purpose, which is faster than simple navigating between pages. Undock the thumbnails panel, set the quality, for ex., to 700, and size to 1000. You can mark problem pages with Ctrl+Click on a thumbnail and navigate between these selected pages after finishing to fix them. To finish the preview change the quality and size values back and dock the panel.

  • Fixed other bugs of official, Enhanced and Featured versions and made lots of other improvements.

• Light and Dark color schemes

  You can choose a desired color scheme in settings.

• Multi-threading support for batch processing

  This significantly increases the speed of processing. The count of threads to use can be adjusted while processing.

  Warning! More threads requires more memory to use. Exclude situations of that to be overflowed.

• Full control over settings on output

  This feature enables to control filling margins, normalizing illumination before binarization, normalizing illumination in color areas and Savitzky-Golay and morphological smoothing options at the output stage in any mode (of course, those setting that can be applied in the current mode).

• Filling outside areas

  Now outside pixels can be filled with the background color of the page.

  Added filling setting with the following options:

  1. Background: estimate the background and fill outside pixels with its color.
  2. White: always fill with white.

• Tiff compression

  Tiff compression options allow to disable or change compression method in tiff files.

  There are two options in settings dialog: B&W and color compression.

  1. The B&W one has None, LZW, Deflate and CCITT G4 (Default) options.
  2. The color one has None, LZW (Default), Deflate and JPEG options.

• Adaptive binarization

  Sauvola and Wolf binarization algorithms have been added. They can be applied when normalizing illumination does not help.

• Splitting output

  The feature allows to split the mixed output scans into the pairs of a foreground (letters) and background (images) layer.

  You can choose between B&W or color (original) foreground.

  It can be useful:

  • for the further DjVu encoding,
  • to apply different filters to letters and images, which when being applied to the whole image gives worse results.
  • to apply a binarization to the letters from a third party app without affecting the images.

  Note: That does not rename files to 0001, 0002... It can be made by a third party app, for example Bulk Rename Utility

• Original background

  This feature is a part of the splitting output feature.

  It allows to preserve the original image background in the format ready for the further processing, when BW foreground is used. It can be used to encode into DjVu the pages with the complex background using the semi-auto "split layers" method which gives much higher quality results than DjVu auto segmenter. Also this feature can be used to extract high contrast elements of gradient images into the foreground layer by using second processing of the layer with pictures ("background").

  Properties of the original background:

  • Original background images are saved into "original_background" folder in "out" directory.
  • Pure black (#000000) and white (#ffffff) colors of original background image are reserved into #010101 and #fefefe, respectively.
  • Picture zones are marked with black when the BW content is marked with white. This property allow to use "select by color" feature of an image editor to select needed areas for their further processing, for example, apply blur to white holes and their nearest areas to get an effective compression level of the background layer in DjVu.
  • Filling zones feature also removes trash and speckles from the original background when applied to the foreground layer.

• Color segmenter and posterization

  Color segmentation and posterization (color quantization) features have been implemented.

  Color segmentation allows to split the image into color segments and colorize b&w mask. Posterization allows to reduce the number of colors of the image by grouping similar colors. The main use of posterization is to be applied to segmented image to get an indexed image, that can then be encoded into DjVu as the foreground layer. It allows to create high-quality DjVu files with color text and elements having maximal compression level. Posterization can also be used in color mode and can be applied to usual color gradient images for different purposes, for example, to increase their compression efficiency.

• Rectangular picture shape

  "Quadro" picture shape mode from Featured was merged with Rectangular one from Enhanced. Also removed restriction of ver. Featured on deleting all the auto zones. Before it resulted in resetting all the auto zones back. Added sensitivity option. If sensitivity equals 25%, the results will be the same as they were in old "Quadro" mode, if 100% - as in old "Rectangular".

• New zone interaction modes

  • Zone creation mode:
    Press Z to switch to polygonal mode.
    Press X to switch to lasso (free drawing) mode.
    Press C to switch to rectangular mode.
    Press Z or X while creating a new zone to switch between polygonal and rectangular modes respectively.
  • Zone:
    Shift+LMB on a zone - drag the zone.
    Ctrl+Shift+LMB on a zone - drag the zone copying.
    Ctrl+Alt+Click - copy the latest created zone to the current cursor position.
    Del when the cursor is over a zone - delete the zone.
  • Zone vertex:
    D when the cursor is over a zone vertex - delete the vertex.
    Hold Ctrl when dragging a zone vertex - make the angle of the vertex right.

• Saving zoom and focus on switching output tabs

  The save is precise and considers the images transformations.
  Also added a feature of swithing the output tabs by using Ctrl+1..5 keys combinations.

• Measurement units system

  The settings are available in the main window menu. Available units: pixels, millimetres, centimetres and inches.

  The system affects every aspect of the program, so, for example, it's now possible to adjust margins in pixels, but not only in millimetres or inches.

• Status bar panel

  The panel shows the next information: zone creation mode icon, mouse position relative to the image, physical size of the image, position of the selected page in current order and the page name and type ([L] or [R] - left or right page, if the page has been splitted).

  This feature is also affected by measurement units system.

• Default parameters

  Default parameters system supporting custom profiles has been implemented.

  The system allows to manage the default filter settings for every stage. Those filter parameters will be set as defaults for any new project created.

  For example, it allows to set your own default margins standard, but not default 5, 10, 5, 10 mm, and so for the other parameters.

  Peculiarities:

  1. There are two default profiles: "Default" and "Source". The "Default" profile represents default ST filter settings, the "Source" one represents the settings giving the source as output without any changes.
  2. A user can create its own profiles. User profiles are stored in config/profiles folder or in an system specific one for application data.
  3. The system consider the units settings from the measurement units system. Units are stored in the profile and ST automatically converts the values if needed.

• Collapsible filter options.

  Now group boxes containing filter options can be collapsed/expanded.
  The collapse status is preserved between restarts of the application.

• Auto adjusting content area.

  Use double-click on content to automatically adjust the content area.
  If the content is outside the area, the later will automatically be expanded and adjusted to the content at the position where double-click has been, otherwise the area edge, nearest to that position, will be adjusted (on clicking hold Shift pressed to select left or right edge only or Ctrl to select top or bottom one, or Shift+Ctrl to adjust both the nearest vertical and horizontal edges).

  It's much faster now to correct the content area if, for example, the page number has been missed by the auto algorithm. It is no more required to manually and laboriously move the corners and edges of the content box.

• Black on white detection

  This feature allows to process images with light content on dark background correctly by correcting auto algorithms.

  Peculiarities:

  1. Auto detection of pages with light content on dark background can be enabled or disabled in the settings. Auto detection at the output stage is controlled separately.
  2. There is per page control over the mode in the output filter options.

• Guides

  This feature gives you a more flexible and precise way of positioning content in the page layout. These are horizontal or vertical lines you can display on a page at the margins stage (when aligning enabled).
  Note: Guides are adaptive to the page soft margins, i.e. when the latter changed the guides on the page are automatically adjusted to match the new content position without requiring any manual re-adjusting.

  Capabilities:

  • Right-click to create/remove guides from the context menu called.
  • Right-click on a guide to delete that guide from the context menu called.
  • Ctrl+Alt+LMB - drag the guide under the cursor.
  • Shift/Ctrl+LMB on the content rectangle - drag the page content. Hold Shift pressed to restrict moving along the horizontal axis only or Ctrl for the vertical one. Hold Shift+Ctrl for usual dragging.
  • Double-click on content - automatically attach that content to the nearest guide. Hold Shift pressed to select vertical guides only or Ctrl for horizontal ones. Hold Shift+Ctrl to attach that to both the nearest vertical and horizontal guides.
  • Use the context menu to enable/disable showing the hard margins rectangle.

Building

Go to this repository and follow the instructions given there.