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Another use for an old tablet
(slrpnk.net)
This one is nothing fancy, but it fit our workflow well. My SO has always saved recipes to a pinterest board - normally she brings a laptop to the kitchen and sets it up on a chair.
We finally took this tablet (came from corporate ewaste) and stuck it to the wall. It's too old for most apps but it seems to work well for this. We installed pinterest, and a podcast player. Eventually I'll check if there's a good replacement OS for the expired android version, but I figure we'll do a bit of a trial run, see how it's working for us and what we need, before starting with that.
Any pointers on how to do this? I was thinking about doing something of the sort to some of my books which are too unwieldy to read comfortably but I can't imagine how to get a readable ebook out of this process, and pdfs always end up being too heavy for the devices I read on.
I have no idea if my process will be useful to you but I'm happy to share it. For me, this was kind of an archival effort - decades ago these cookbooks were made in limited runs as fundraisers, put together by womens' groups in the village. Everyone contributed recipes and the names of family friends and relatives are on many of the pages. Plus all her notes, edits, and the additional recipes tucked into the pages. Unfortunately the paper itself was absolutely thrashed and the book as a whole was more of a pile of loose papers than a usable cookbook. I wanted to make sure I could preserve it, so I scanned each page by hand on my old printer/scanner - it's actually pretty easy to get a rhythm going while watching a show. Good for when you're mentally tired and don't want to do complex tasks. I scanned them in pretty high-rez because I was trying to preserve the character of the book.
I rotated and occasionally transformed each image/page until most of the text was level, and piled them all, in order, as layers, into GIMP. I found a good ratio/size for the pages and made sure all the scans were centered inside it. Now and then, as I added and leveled pages, I'd crop them to save data.
Once they were all in, I exported it as a PDF, and used Adobe acrobat (a friend had the pro version and let me use it) to do their text-rec thing, where it looks the same but now you can highlight and search. It's not perfect - it relies a lot on text boxes to get the layout to match what they did with a typewriter decades ago, but I'm happy with it. I don't know how well it'd work if you want a lightweight file for your devices.
I hope that helps