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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   186 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Working on a new project. There is an old out of print book about my family. "The [family name] and their kin". Old copies run for a hundred or more dollars on Amazon.

There is a free scanned version of the book too, but the scan isn't great quality. Adobe was able to figure out most of the words, but there are some glaring mistakes. Typically a mistake every 50 words or so, which is far too common.

I'd like to do a reprint. I just attended the annual meeting of the "[family name] society" and there was interest from everyone there in getting a new hard copy.

I've been copying and pasting the text from the PDF into a grok window and having it make corrections, re-italisize, and de-format the text. Might be another 20 hours to get it all converted.

I've looked up some print options as well and think with about a hundred copies I could get per book costs to $15-30. Depending on options I select. Color / hard back / images / etc.

have you tried using OCRmyPDF or Abbyy FineReader to do the first conversion? And then do the editing in docx/html.

I have not, I'll look into it, thanks for the recommendation.

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