Slightly laboriously

This week I finished the final little bit (80%) of making PDFs of my mum’s local history books and booklets. It was inevitably more complicated and confusing than I expected so I’m describing what I did in case it helps anyone do something similar, better, in the future. I’m doing all this using macOS. Scanning inner pages I had extra copies of all the books so was able to cut all the pages out, slightly laboriously, using a scalpel and ruler. I could then feed all the inner pages through my ScanSnap s1300i, which I bought years ago after reading Getting Things Done – it’s an extremely useful luxury. This scanner can only take 10 sheets at a time which made scanning a 300-page (150-sheet) book a bit more work than with a bigger scanner. But still pretty quick. I wouldn’t have contemplated this project if I’d only had a flatbed scanner. I scanned all the pages to black-and-white PDFs using “Better” quality, black-and-white being the smallest MB-wise. I opened the first PDF file in…