Where have we been?  We have taken a brief break from knitting to deal with our mess.  Why are we discussing this in the Machine Knitting dept instead of Wilbur’s technoblog???  Because the mess is our knitting mags!  Wilbur tells the story better…

Dear Readers,

As you know, our geese have regular meetings to discuss new purchases and the mess in the nest.   Generally, I keep the girls in line, but somehow, I missed the meeting where they decide to buy 3 HUGE paper boxes worth of magazines.  Yes, somehow, many someones else’s trash arrived in our nest.  Not only that…but the girls opened the boxes and started READING all of this stuff.   We had machine knitting mags in every room, dusty, buggy in EVERY ROOM!  YUCKY.  But the girls love those mags and wouldn’t let go.   Plus…the girls kept looking for articles about their SilverReeds, articles about their Passap and it was a page in one mag, 2 pages in another.  Just FINDING the info was a pain.  So it was time for a better solution. 

Supply List:

• Fujitsu ScanSnap 50 page ADF scanner (scans both sides of the paper at the same time)
• Carl Heavy Duty Rotary Trimmer – 30+ page capacity with clamping power!
• Adobe Acrobat X – the full one, not the reader
• ACDSee – we upgraded to 12, but for this project, it wasn’t necessary.  Use Ghostscript 8.53
• FastPictureViewer Codec
• Utility Knife, ruler (for larger books/mags)
• Magazines/books

Instructions:

1. Determine if your magazine is perfect bound (glued at the edge) or stapled.  
   
2. If the magazine is perfect bound and thicker than 30 pages, open the magazine roughly in the center.   Crease well to attempt to break the binding (will only work on truly thick books).  Use a utility knife to cut down the center of the magazine.
   
   If the magazine is perfect bound and < 30 pages or you’ve cut it into roughly 30 page pieces, slip the binding under the Carl Cutter clamp, clamp down, cut approx 3/16” binding off.  This will almost guarantee keeping all the text, but may leave some pages glued together.   Make sure each page is separated and loose.
   
   If the magazine is stapled, open the magazine up in the center, Cut the magazine approx 1/8” away from the staple on either side of the binding.  Don’t cut the staple because this will wreck your blade.
   
3. Use the Scanner to scan the pages.  We drop each page into the feeder separately because it avoids the scanner pulling two sheets at the same time.  You don’t have to wait until the previous sheet has scanned, just drop one in, let it scan, as it’s working, drop a second, third, fourth sheet.  Keep doing this until you’ve run out of pages.  We can usually get 6-8 sheets into the feeder at a time. 
   
   *IF* you have a stack of papers that are not thin, magazine slick pages, you might be able to drop a stack of 50 into the feeder after fanning it, but more likely than not, you don’t have perfect, non-bent/wrinkled pages, and something will stick and you’ll be fixing it.  That’s why we just hand feed it in, except for “good” stacks of paper.
   
4. The FastPictureViewer Codec will allow you to view the thumbnail of the PDF in Windows Explorer so that it’s easier to rename them.  You can also see this in ScanSnap Organizer, which comes free with the scanner.
   
5. Use the Adobe Acrobat X to extract all the pages of your mag into separate pages.  Now, you might be asking yourself “Why didn’t we do this in the first place?”   First…if you save as a magazine, you’ll have the whole mag, which you probably do want.  Second, if you save as a mag first, when you extract the pages, each one will be named “Magazine Name – page#”
   
6. Take a look at your mag pages and delete the ads (you have them in your full mag file, but for your individual pages, we don’t think they’re needed).   Now, start identifying the two page articles and combine them into one by using the Adobe Acrobat X 
   
7. You now have files that are a full article.  Just put them into categories so that you can find them again!   Use ACDSee and create categories.   We use Ghostscript to allow you to see the thumbnail of the PDF file.  Why use ACDSee?   It’s easy, it allows the one file to be in multiple categories and it was relatively cheap.   It’s also a software that will be around.  Yes, we’ve invested in less expensive software that “disappeared” and we “lost” our efforts.     For better or worse, ACDsee should be around for awhile or someone will translate their database. 

Yes…it’s a huge project, but our geese can do it.  And once finished, we’ll have far more time to knit since we’ll be wasting less searching…