Experiences in digitizing a book at home

I was browsing Hacker News one night, and I came across a thread about the teaching script Getty-Dubay Italic, and I was intrigued. I don't find the script very aesthetically pleasing, but I did like the idea of making a deliberate effort to make my handwriting more ergonomic, consistent, and legible. I once came across a practice handwriting sheet from 5th grade and saw I've made little progress on my cramped irregular cursive in 27 years.

I can always add personal flair later.

So I bought a book. This book. Darkness took me. And I strayed out of thought and time.

I quickly found I do not like trying to write in a book for the purpose of practicing handwriting. It's quite cumbersome.

I discovered there is an app that is basically a shell for the e-book version. I downloaded it for my Android tablet, and learned the 2.8 star rating is fairly accurate. There is no scroll lock, and the palm rejection is poor, though the developer attributes these problems to the tablet OS you are using and not their app.

So I did the most reasonable thing left at this point – I grabbed a hair dryer and razor blade and removed the cover and spine. I basically have a small print shop from organizing pre-Covid & child, and got to work trimming the ragged ends off.

Next I loaded the completed sheets into my auto-feed scanner, and experimented with which settings created the most consistent output.

I came across a tool called ocrmypdf which suggests it can deskew and further compress a PDF of scans. I am not certain it did much but it did at least make the file smaller.

wjbolles@rog-g14-zeph:/mnt/c/Users/wjbolles/Documents$ ocrmypdf --tesseract-timeout=0 --deskew --clean Scan2025-02-12_192038.pdf WriteNow.pdf

The final product is very functional on my eInk writing tablet. The 227 dpi screen struggles a little on the finer details occasionally, and I may do a second attempt with smaller batches to help with skewing, but I'm really happy with the results. As a bonus it only took an hour.

If I get tired of that I can always make worksheets with the laser printer.