About the Parker E-book

This website was created as an Eagle Project by Matthew McCoy in 2006. This page explains how the task of making Edward E. Parker's 664 page book, The History of Brookline New Hampshire with Tables of Family Records and Genealogies, into an online e-book (electronic book) was accomplished. This project was important mostly because there were very few printed versions of the book remaining in town.

Before I could start anything there was a lot of planning and a lot of paper work involved. I met with Mrs. Abt, chairman of the History Committee, several times to work out exactly what I would be doing for this project. I developed a plan of how I would complete the project and she approved it. Then I had to go before the Boy Scouts of America Arrowhead District's advancement committee. They had to approve my project plan before I could begin. They did, and I was free to begin the project.

I raised the necessary money for the project. With the help of Boy Scouts from Troop 260 of Brookline I held a car wash and accepted donations on July 15, 2006 at Caryn's Convenience on Rt. 13. The next task was to get the book 'unbound'; otherwise known as separating the pages from the cover. New Hampshire Bindery Inc. located in Concord, NH performed this for me for free.

Then I held the major part of the project. The task was to scan in every page of the book without making mistakes. This was accomplished on September 28, 2006 by a team of six scouts: five were from our own Troop 260 of Brookline, and one was a friend from Troop 610 of Pelham, NH. Using three scanners the scouts did an excellent job, scanning in ALL 664 pages in just about six hours.

If you are interested in which settings I used to scan each file and how I created the files which you see in the e-book then jump to the Scan Settings Section below.

I used the money raised from the car wash to purchase Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional. With it I pulled each of the separate files, created by the scanners, into larger PDF files according to chapter or section of Part II. Part I was put into 26 files (Chapters 1 - 26) and Part II was split up into 12 different sections.

To finish up the project I created this website to display the book. This way, anyone who is interested can have easy access to the e-book on the Internet.

If you have any questions about the Parker E-book please feel free to contact historycommittee@brookline.nh.us.

Scan Settings and Chapter Creation Process

These are the settings which I used on my DELL All-in-One (AIO) 922 Printer/Scanner to scan in the following types of files: Text, Image, Text & Image.

Following the settings is the process of how I created each chapter Portable Document Format file (PDF).

Text:

Normal text-only pages were scanned in at 300 Dots per Inch (DPI) in Black & White color. The DELL AIO 922 software (DELL AIO Center) was set to autocrop which cut off all white space surrounding each page (including the excess white from the 6x9 page margin in the book). The image was then exported to Jasc Paint Shop Pro Album 4.0 DELL Edition (because Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional was not yet installed on the computer) and saved as a JPEG (.jpg) file.

Image:

I rescanned all image and combined text & image pages after the scanning party. The reason is because during the scanning party...in order to attain efficiency we scanned in all pages using the above Text-only page method. Therefore all images were in black and white and were discolored. Once I had purchased and installed Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional on my computer I was able to edit the scan settings to include Grayscale which is what brought out the best in the images.

Image-only / images-with-captions pages were scanned in at 300 DPI in Grayscale color. DELL AIO Center was set to autocrop here as well. The image was then exported to Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional and saved as a PDF (.pdf) file.

Combined Image & Text:

Same settings as with the image files; see above.

1. Using Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Pro I clicked on the Create PDF button and selected the sub-button 'From Multiple Files'.
2. Under 'Add Files' I clicked 'Browse' and selected all the pages (both in .jpg and .pdf format) that were to be in the chapter. Then I click 'Add'. In the 'Create PDF from Multiple Documents' dialog I click OK. Acrobat Pro "Assembled" the document, combining all the selected image files into one "Binder". For each .jpg file it converted it to a PDF automatically. I then had to save the "Binder" as 'Chapter_x.pdf' where 'x' was the chapter # I was creating the file for.
3. Some of the pages were scanned in 'upside-down'. So I now used the Pages Side-bar to locate these pages. I then selected the thumbnail of the page >> Right-Click >> Rotate Pages. I then entered the page range to rotate and was able to choose to rotate only even pages, odd pages, or both even and odd pages. I was able to select rotate 90 degrees clockwise, counter-clockwise, or 180 degrees. I rotated 180 degrees to 'flip' the pages.
4. I checked each page for errors, like a repeat in a page, correct page number, bad scan, etc.
5. I went to Tools >> Print Production >> Crop Pages. I went down to Change Page Size and selected the radio-button next to 'Custom' and entered the custom page size of 6 inches by 9 inches. (The same as the original book....remember the autocrop cut off the excess white including the 6x9 margin.) I then selected 'All' under Page Range so the master margin would be set.
6. I went back to the Pages side-bar to find any image files which appeared in the book vertically. I rotated them 90 degrees either clockwise or counter-clockwise so that the images and text were viewable.
7. I went to Document >> Recognize Text using OCR >> Start... which brought up a dialog where I selected to use OCR on all pages in the binder but not to export to a document but keep it instead as: "PDF Output Style: Searchable Image (Exact)". Acrobat Pro then ran OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and recognized all text while keeping the files as themselves (not exporting the results to a .txt file). It even recognized the captions under images. This process was automated by Acrobat but did take a few minutes per binder. I then saved the .pdf. This process resulted in the searchablilty of the files in the e-book.
8. I went to Advanced >> PDF Optimizer... This device will take the file currently anywhere from 5 MB to 45 MB in size and decrease it to anywhere from 900 KB to 7 MB in size. However, it reduces compatibility of the final .pdf to just Acrobat Reader version 6.0 and later. In some cases earlier versions of Acrobat Reader (4.0) have been able to successfully view the file but not always. I saved over the old Chapter_x.pdf (part of the optimizing process). Once the fully-automated process was complete it saved the small-sized .pdf again for me and all was complete!!!