Michael A. Terrell wrote:

msg wrote:

I would appreciate some suggestions for stitching together scanned
sections of large format diagrams (schematics); photo editors such
as Photoshop or the GIMP require a lot of resources, are often
sluggish (if you don't have very fast hardware) and require a lot
of tedious manipulation to achieve the result. There are photographic
panorama stitching tools but these too may have problems with a large
number of high-resolution scan sections on slower hardware. Microsoft
Photo Editor 3.0 had features that made the task quite simple, but
it is difficult to install as a stand-alone app without a version
of Office.

What are folks using for a simple solution to this task (other than
purchasing an expensive large-format scanner)?

Michael



I use the Paper Port software that came with my Visioneer 4400
scanner to scan and straighten each page,

This must be the key to 'nudging' them together in Paint; how does
this software straighten? Automatically?, selectable rotations? Does
the rotation appear in real time or do you enter a guestimate value?

I pretty much gave up trying to straighten in Irfanview when the
schematic is very cluttered, as it is quite unlikely that I will
match details when abutting two images thus straightened and cropped.

'hugin' does a good job but it is a real chore to set up and takes
a _long_ time to process.

then crop them in paint. Then
I use paint to piece them together.

Do you copy each image to the clipboard and then paste it into the
base image in Paint?

A 11" * 17" schematic takes less
than five minutes to crop, combine and save on a 633 MHz computer with
256 MB of RAM, and running ME. It was sitting around for a while, not
being used, so I cleaned it up and I am building a custom workstation to
do graphics work. I can scan and combine two pages in five to ten
minutes this way on that old computer.

I would appreciate reading more details of your procedure.

Michael