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FAQ for submission format?

Printed From: FSI Language Courses
Category: Language Courses
Forum Name: Member Contributions
Forum Discription: If you have course materials and are planning to contribute them to the website, this is the place to let everyone know.
URL: http://fsi-language-courses.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=357
Printed Date: 16 January 2009 at 3:05am


Topic: FAQ for submission format?
Posted By: Poetry
Subject: FAQ for submission format?
Date Posted: 03 April 2007 at 11:21am
Hi,
I seem to recall a request for this, but can't find any answers.

I'm about to start scanning off the Luganda text course. (Basic and Pretraining) I have the texts in hand, though not the tapes.

Is there any specific format for scanning? Any particular dpi or size? Any hints on the pdf format?

We have the Full Acrobat package at home. I haven't tried to scan and tie together the pages of a book into one document yet. Usually I am scanning photos from magazines to load into my craft database so I can visually index them.

Are there any hints for this? I can scan the pages individually, but I want to tie all of them together after that into a single larger pdf.

I've been experimenting with the tape formatting (on other language tapes) with both Nero Ultimate and Polderbits. Nero is probably more powerful, but I'm sort of tending to like Polderbits because the learning curve is so small and it's easy to cut and create tracks in the waveform analysis. I've been cutting up the exercises into their own tracks so that they can be easily gotten to in the various players. Of course, I am just recording off the tapes in one block first, then carving them up after.

So, what are you all using? Hints? How about an FAQ/Sticky for the formatting of tapes and pdf's?

--Poetry



Replies:
Posted By: Chung
Date Posted: 03 April 2007 at 1:07pm
I use Audacity when converting the tapes of language courses for my MP3 player. It's fairly easy to do, but just takes time as I can't accelerate my tape deck.
 
Like you, I prefer to insert breaks after 1 or 2 exercises because it's useful to assign an exercise or two to every track. This is how I set up the audio of FSI Finnish on my MP3 player.
 
When I was digitalizing the audio of FSI Finnish for gdfellows, I also intended to let gdfellows set up the links on this website in the same way.
 
However, for the sake of downloading from this site and not making gdfellows create over a hundred links for all of the audio, I just let each side of a tape correspond to its own track, thus cutting down the number of links that gdfellows needed to create in order to include all of the audio.


Posted By: Poetry
Date Posted: 20 April 2007 at 11:16am
Hi Chung,
Couldn't the audio for a tape that's broken up that way be put into a folder and just post the folder as one link? That way it keeps the breaks for ease of use, but doesn't have 20 small files to deal with.

One of the other big issues that I have is that is there any particular settings for the pdf file? I'm not a major Acrobat user though we have it on our computer at home. I figured out how to stuff all of the pages into one document, but is there some set of settings like size of document etc that is used here?

Thanks!
--Poetry


Posted By: Chung
Date Posted: 20 April 2007 at 3:31pm

Hi Poetry

Run it by gdfellows. He and I had discussed this matter in private messages a while ago when I was working on the Finnish audio, but to keep it simple we decided that I'd just do it "unbroken" and let each MP3 file be equivalent to one side of every tape.
 
I think that there is a way to split the audio into smaller parts if you set up a group of files as a .zip. Let people then download the .zip and then when those people unzip the file, it'll come out as dozens of smaller files corresponding to a lesson or exercise. See what gdfellows thinks.
 
Chung


Posted By: Poetry
Date Posted: 29 April 2007 at 12:10am
Hi,
I think I've settled on Polderbits as my software of choice for ripping the mp3 and wav files (I'm also ripping high definition wav files to store).  I'm rather fond of the way that I can just pull the recording off to digital very easily in one chunk, then edit with the Polderbits Sound Editor to break it into tracks.  It's pretty easy software to use.  Worth the roughly $40 to me for ease of use.  I then use ACE Zip, a free software, to create the zip files of the tracks.
 
But my biggest problem are the pdf files.  On the Luganda course, the FSI course text that I borrowed from our library was bound in hardback form.  That binding is very close to the edges of some of the text.  In the book, it's readable.  But when I scan, I'm coming close to obscuring the edge of the text.  The right-hand side pages are very clearly visible, while the left-hand pages are almost obscured on the edge.  As I pass the middle of the textbook and begin scanning the latter half of it, I expect that that view will shift to left-hand pages visible and right-hand obscured.
 
I'm thinking that I will go ahead and scan the pages that I can get clearly, and maybe take digital photos of the ones that I can't get a clear scan on.  Then use something like Adobe Photoshop to convert the tif/jpg file to a pdf. 
 
Has anyone else had this problem?  How did you solve it?
--Poetry
 


Posted By: DemiPuppet
Date Posted: 29 April 2007 at 5:46pm
I had the same problem when I scanned a bound version of Yoruba Basic.  I used Gimp, free software,  to copy and paste letter and word images from the good side of the page over to the bad side.  It takes time, but there isn't much else that can be done.

GDF will probably be posting the the Yoruba in the next day or so, so you can see how it turned out.



Posted By: Poetry
Date Posted: 02 May 2007 at 11:41am
Hi Demi,
Which pages in the Yoruba course were doctored?  I'd like to take a look at them and see what they look like. 
 
If I get the time this weekend, I'll experiment with doing a digital photo, too, to see if I can get more text in the shot. 
 
--Poetry


Posted By: DemiPuppet
Date Posted: 02 May 2007 at 9:41pm
Here's an example of one of the pages before I edited it:

http://www.yousendit.com/download/WUJaM25EQzdENlEwTVE9PQ - http://www.yousendit.com/download/WUJaM25EQzdENlEwTVE9PQ



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