scanning letters
You're welcome. I also have the Last State ready to scan. I will scan it as 100 dpi and try several various formats to see which works best.

Good news - I met with a professor of religion today who has been studying the COG/FOG from nearly the beginning. I gave him a stack of mo books and other pubs for him to borrow. He knows Gordon Melton and is also perplexed at his apologetic mentality towards TFI. He writes books and wrote a book on Synonon. I think he is quite respected in the religious community. He hopes to use some of this material for further writings. It will be good if we can get a good objective writing from a respected professor to counteract all these apologists. He has the books on loan until the end of August.

I'm on it. I'll have them up soon in PDF format.

Re: scanning letters


The best settings for scanning text are:

~ B&W only (aka Monochrome, Lineart) -- this is not grayscale, but rather only black and only white pixels (if you need to scan a pencil drawing, use grayscale, but never color -- unless there is color in there somewhere)

~400 dpi (good), 600 dpi (better), or 1200 dpi (best) resolution-- If your scanner only shows scaling in percentages, than anywhere from 300% to about 1000% should be good

If you save the images as B&W only, the file size will be quite small even at a high resolution. Still, this depends on the format you save it in.

~JPEGs are never good for saving quality text scans in. If scanning in B&W only, try saving the files in either PCX or GIF format. Both of these will save the B&W image with lossless quality while keeping the file size down as well. If neither of these options are available to you, then saving them into a PDF file will work as well.

If scanned and saved in this way, the files will flexible enough to use for PDFs on the web and OCR (text recognition) as well.

scanning
Johnny - that is different than what Monger told me. He said 300 dpi wasn't necessary. Now I'm confused. I don't know how to find all those choices on my little scanner. I'll look around though and see what I can figure out. Thanks for those explanations.

I only said 300 wasn't necessary because I know you're sending them with a dial-up modem. If I scanned them myself I'd do something higher. WalkerJ's recommendation to save using B&W only as PCX or GIF files (for text, not for cover images) is a good one.

Acheick
I C! So, you would prefer higher DPI, if I can provide it. Then I will send them at night before bed and just set the computer to sign off when completed. I'll try and figure out if there is some sort of preference that will let me chose B&W. Thanks for the tips. You're all doing such a wonderful job - smart bunch of chaps (and lassies) you are.

Acheick, I'll send you my Gmail address in a Private Message... If you can send any large files there (or to other editors who're OK with receiving such files) instead of to the shared Editors account, that would be appreciated. I will in turn upload them to the xFamily server & provide links in this thread. Thanks!

Sounds good
I'll do what I can. I'm so tied up with family emergencies all the time, I wish I could do more. But I know you are all busy too.

Acheick, one more thing that would be helpful if you could check out, when you have some time... do you have the "Sex with Grandmother" Mo Letter? (DFO 1535) We have the first few pages at http://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Sex_With_Grandmother , but from what I understand it gets much weirder past that point.

sex with grandmother
I'm not sure if I have that - I'm thinking I do. I gave most of my books to the prof for 2 months. I'll email him and ask him to check, if it's in there, I'll get him to copy it and then I'll scan it for you. Yes, it is a most creepy letter.

From acheick, sent July 3rd:

- last state pp 540-549.pdf
- last state pp 550-563.pdf

Interesting reading, but I couldn't read much of it as it simply sickened me.

The Family putting their own sins onto another.

The biggest day dreamer and pride filled one of all was David Berg, closely followed by karen Zerby (although I suspect she was/and continues to be, a worse devil).

Cool
OK - so how do you think the text is? I don't think it's good enough. I'm going to try and scan the rest as 600 dpi in b/w. I won't get to it today as we have to go into town yet again for another family problem (my family that is). I'm also going to check with the professor and look through the stuff to see if I have Sex with Grandmother.

You are right, Evanman - it is horrible reading. I can only stomach so much of it at a time. Sometimes I have to quit for a few months to take a break as it becomes too emotional.

I think that the text size is too small for most people, the Mo-letter's text was always a bit hard on the eyes.

Is it not possible to change the font? Or the font size before publishing on the web?

This can be done with OCR (Optical Character Recognition), but the scans will need to be a higher resolution for that.

I'll create PDFs from the above files this evening, and regenerate the PDFs once Acheick scans them in again.

I will rescan the last state
I'll try 600 dpi b/w. I'll work on it tomorrow sometime.

To Monger: I do not have Sex with Grandmother, for some reason, I'm minus book 14. Strange, because I could have sworn I read that, or maybe I read it somewhere on the web. Somebody has it.

Re: I will rescan the last state


Just as a point, "Sex with Grandmother" should have been put in speach marks (inverted commas).

It may be minor but I'm sure you do not want to have sex with your grandmother!

Acheick
Alrighty, Evanguy, I will most certainly shore up my punctuation since others are watching :wink:

I am always watching grammar and spelling. I often point out to US speakers that certain phrases and words used in US mean something else in UK.

As they say--US & UK, two countries separated by a common language.