View source for Treating the Traité

<div class="intro">Experiments with digital iterations of The Book on the Book.</div>

== Scan Tailor ==

[[person::Tomislav Medak]] spends two days with us to demonstrate a workflow for digitizing books. I use the opportunity to look at the Traité through the lens of Scan Tailor, "an interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages"<ref>http://scantailor.org/</ref>. 

First, I import the image files exported from the [http://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/handle/1854/5612/Traite_de_documentation_ocr.pdf pdf] into Scan Tailor and let it treat the Traité with all options set to 'automatic'. It produces exciting artefacts:

{{#ask: [[technology::Scan Tailor]] | format=gallery}}

== Printing the Traité ==

The <em>Traité de documentation : le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique</em> is an almost hypertextual book on documentation, written in the 1930's by Paul Otlet. It has many cross-references, tables and illustrations; at times it is written in encyclopedic style, turns into a passionate manifesto, speculative fiction, and a practical manual for librarians. The pdf I have is badly OCR-ed and too heavy for reading comfortably on a digital device. So this morning I transformed the digital version into something that I can print at a copy shop.

I started with extracting the images from the pdf with the help of the imagemagick convert command:

<code>$ mkdir spreads</code>

<code>$ convert Traite\ de\ documentation\ -\ Paul\ Otlet.pdf spreads/%03d.jpg</code>

<!--more-->Next I removed front- and back-cover (they will be treated separately), and also <code>113.jpg</code> (pages 118-119 are repeated), then cut each spread in half:

<code>mkdir pages</code>

<code>convert spreads/*.jpg -crop 2x1@ pages/%03d.jpg</code>

The properties of the original pdf mention a paper size of 200 × 260 mm (and also that the file was created with <code>ABBYY FineReader</code> on <code>Monday December 3, 2007 16:25:51 CET</code> (This file is already 6 years old ...). I am not sure if the measurements refer to the size of the spread or the single page, but from the detailed description in the catalog of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent <ref>http://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:000990276#reference-details</ref> I gather that pages are 26cm high, and will fit comfortably on an A4: <code>431, [12], viii p. : illus. ; 26 cm.</code>

I then simply put all images back into a new pdf:

<code>convert pages/*jpg traite.pdf</code>

Tomorrow I'll have the document printed and bound. Can't wait.

== Transcribing the Traité ==
in progress on [http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:Otlet_-_Trait%C3%A9_de_documentation,_1934.djvu Wikisource]  

https://github.com/PaulOtlet/traite
http://traite.czam.de/en/latest/otlet_traite_1934_FR.html#i-buts-de-la-documentation

== Sources ==
Original scans http://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/handle/1854/5612/Traite_de_documentation_ocr.pdf
OCR https://archive.org/details/OtletTraitDocumentationUgent