Archive for January, 2012

Scanning Hand Written Texts Into High Quality Digital Files

The purpose of this exercise is to convert a hand written note – such as your signature – to high quality digital files that can be used to embed “hand write” into documents – such as when someone asks you to fax them a “signed” copy of the PDF they emailed you. You’d be surprised how often that happens around here.

Required Ingridients:

  • A computer with The GIMP installed
  • Your handy smart phone with a 5MP or better camera
  • A good pen and paper.

So anyway, here’s the process from top to bottom, with pictures:

  1. Sit down at a proper table, and using a good black heavy-line pen1 on a white clean high-density paper, write what you need to write – slowly and deliberately but without pauses. Try not to smear the ink so you get clean continuous lines, otherwise the quality suffers a lot.
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  1. in this shot I used a 0.7 permanent marker – which is just overdoing it – probably any 0.7 pen will work []