Scantailor problem

[ngarber]

I've been having issues with Scantailor on the last couple of projects. In the right window column the music looks just as I scanned it, but as soon as I attempt to deskew, I cuts off some of the right and left-hand music. Generally it cuts of brackets on the left side of systems.

The other problem is that is doesn't recognize content in any logical way.


Anybody have similar problems and solutions? Thanks.
Neil

[coulonnus]

In the right window column the music looks just as I scanned it, but as soon as I attempt to deskew, I cuts off some of the right and left-hand music.

I don't know Scantailor but I think the best deskewing advice when you scan is don't! Unless you scan at grayscale, very high resolution, deskewing implies sort of an interpolation - not to say a guess - to calculate the new pixels. I always make a "manual" deskewing with my score on the scanner and scan again. 1-mm residual skew between the top and the bottom of a page is acceptable. I use Irfanview.

The other problem is that is doesn't recognize content in any logical way.

What do you mean? Do you want "optical note recognition"?

[ngarber]

Not optical note recognition. Scantailor finds the edge of the text block and delineates it. I'm finding that with some scans it cuts off the edge of the music, usually system brackets and there's no way to make it put them back. I think for some scans I may have to do all the work manually.

[Afp0815]

Scantailor is quite clever in "cleaning" scanned scores, although it is optimized for books.

Therefore Scantailor tries to determine first, whether the scan contains more than one page. You need to force Scantailor not to try that (Split pages -> Page layout -> left icon (full page) -> change -> manual -> all pages)

Deskewing will work fine as it uses horizontal lines for orientation and a score has plenty of them unless very old scores have printed systems in different angels, which would require a manual correction.

Select content is based on the selected page layout, therefore selecting the full page was important otherwise parts of the score are cut off. Scantailor works fine with brackets, but sometimes misses a page or plate number far away from the score itself. It can also include some 'dirt'. Than the content area can easily be manually updated. Title pages usually need manual correction.

Despeckling is also very good as Scantailor does not touch a line as long as the lines are not broken. You need to be careful with dotted, dashed or broken lines, despeckling on max level will remove parts of it. Use the despeckling preview to browse thru the pages and reduce the despeckling level where necessary.

For me Scantailor is the fastest way to clean a score. Only converting pictures or graphics on the title page to black&white is better be done with Photoshop or other tools for pictures.

[Carolus]

I wonder how practical it would be to have ScanTailor as a cloud-based application which could be run by anyone with a web browser. Since it's open-source, there shouldn't be any IP issues. The technical issues might be another matter altogether though. Even if it were something open only to IMSLP registered users, it might be worth looking into, especially if it could be tweaked to facilitate the processing of music scores. There are quite a few things over at archive.org which are in JPEG 2000 format which could stand to be processed into printable monochrome files.

[coulonnus]

I can't help, but is there a Scantailor website showing images before and after the Scantailor action? It would be great to improve the low resolution, color or grayscale scans made by some libraries!