So if you’ve got them scanned do you have them hosted somewhere already? Or can you email them to me? I’ll get working on cleaning the images and clearing all the balloons so you can focus on the translations.
And yeah, scanning tanks are a pain in the rear. I have Outlaw Star tanks that I’d love to have translated, but scanning them without pulling them apart… yeah that sucks.
So JG, are you saying you have physical copies of those doujins? Cuz that would be an awesome starting point. That way at least with the first few we could control the image quality. I’m sure they’re priceless to you, so you wouldn’t want to de- staple them so it would still take some touching up to get rid of the shadows from the binding, but the translation is more important.
Well lets decide on a plan of action. What do we actually want to start with? We need to focus on getting and entire work finished in some way shape or form.
Actually that’s not true about page 1. Page 2 is just a sketch, so nothing that needs to be translated. Page one is all in hiragana. If you know your kana tables, you can at least transliterate it or manually type it into a translator. Not that difficult.
Here… how are these for higher quality? These are from (C50) [Nontan Project (Kajishima Masaki)] Tenchi Souran. As you can see, the lower starting quality means some things I can restore, like “Page 162”, some things I can’t, like “Page 3.” Particularly with the kanji, some of the smaller strokes get squished and no amount of contrast can get them back. But, I did what I can, and the file sizes are waaaay bigger, so the images are better quality. It doesn’t take too long to do this either. What takes time is when I have to do redraws to restore the image. Tell me what you think though.
I’m on a Mac, so the programs are different. I tried three of them, Adobe Acrobat, OCRKit, and ReadIris. The last one worked the best. I was surprised that Adobe performed so poorly, it only got like half the characters right. ReadIris got the kanji right but some of the hiragana subscripts were off. Either way, the translation came out almost entirely incomprehensible.
Yeah I spent the night trying with various programs on a few images. Results were mixed, and all were difficult to understand. The best one I found didn’t translate vertical unfortunately.
