mandarine

Introduction

Pencasting: publication of manuscript content to the world-wide-web as scanned images of pen-and-paper text. The practice is not new, but the term was first coined in April 2007 by mandarine in Emily’s blog.

The underlying idea behind pencasting is that it can serve as a very nice complement to blogging, halfway between plain digital text publication and podcasting; halfway in terms of how much of the blogger’s personality is revealed, and halfway in terms of how much bandwidth is needed.

People reasonably comfortable with multimedia publication should have no difficulties inventing their own pencasting process. This tutorial is pencasting for dummies (well, not completely, for if you have a scanner, chances are you have already scanned stuff — if not, play with your scanner first).

Minimum hardware configuration

• a pen and a sheet of paper
• a computer with an internet connection
• a flatbed scanner (or a digital camera)

The tutorial

Write something

Choosing ink and paper with a good contrast might be a good idea to start from. It takes more photo editing skills to pencast a text that’s written with a faint pencil on brownish manila paper than for black ink on white paper.

It may seem obvious, but do not write on both sides of the page unless your paper is really opaque. Otherwise you may end up with a reverse ghost of the back-side-writing on each scan.

Now the page format: if you want your handwriting to appear inline as a blog post, it will have to fit nicely in your theme’s page width without looking shrunk or magnified. As most screens have an apparent resolution close to 100 pixels per inch, it means the width of your handwritten lines should be as many inches as there are hundreds of pixels in your theme’s page width. For instance, my WordPress theme has a fixed post width of 450 pixels, which means that my paper width should be 4.5 inches (11.5 cm). In fact, this should be adapted to how ‘big’ your handwriting looks with respect to the font on your blog: you do not want your handwritten letters to appear much larger or much smaller than your typed text. This is why I use a paper width of 5 inches (13 cm) instead.

Lines on lined paper may interfere with the text after the scan process (at a high contrast, the line can either disappear or turn solid black) or give too much of a schoolbook look to the pencast. I prefer to use a thick-lined heavy paper sheet below my plain white paper, so that the lines show through and help me while I write, without leaving any traces on the final manuscript.

Ink flow (especially in fountain-pens) and hand muscles will have a transient phase before steadying. You may want to scribble a few lines on draft paper before starting the real page. As for what to write, I am afraid this tutorial is not qualified to give you any advice. My pencasting policy here at mandarine’s is: when it’s personal, it’s pencast (that way, google cannot find me on personal stuff).

Find the right scanning settings

I assume your scanner is already installed and detected by your computer. Switch it on. Open a photo editing tool or the software that comes with your scanner and start the scanning interface (e.g. from the GIMP: File/Acquire/TWAIN).

You should end up with a TWAIN interface like the one below. If you only get the basic interface, try to find the tab or menu or button or checkbox that says ‘advanced’ or ‘more options’, because we want to go further than just the basic settings. Click the thumbnail below for an example of such a scan interface (this one is quite old). Depending on your scanner, your operating system or your driver, it might look completely different, although you should find basically the same features.

Request a preview: your page will appear as a small preview that will reflect all changes you make to scan settings. Maybe there are preset scanning parameters for text. If they suit you, you can select them. But generally, they are not suitable, and you will have to change settings manually.

You should be spending some time finetuning these settings if you intend to publish pencast material on a regular basis, as it will save you a lot of post-processing. The objective is to have:

• good contrast but not too sharp lest it should look like a fax
• white background without greyish ghosts
• the right resolution (around 100 dpi) so that the scan result does not need to be resampled (unless you feel familiar with resampling).

I went with the advanced settings and changed the exposure, and the values for highlight and shadows. Once again, depending on your scanning interface, your settings dialog may also look different.

The preview should reflect all changes in your settings: when the preview looks OK, it means your settings should be OK, at least as regards light and contrast. Once you are satisfied with the settings, save them and give them a name (like ‘pencast’). That way, you do not have to do everything all over again next time you feel like pencasting.

Note that the right settings will probably depend on which pen and paper you are using: try to stick to your favorite combination if you want consistent renderings. Or else modify the settings for each combination and save them under different names (e.g. turquoiseAndManila, highlighterAndPostItNote, etc.)

For a first pencast, if you really cannot find your way through all these settings, try the default black/white photo settings or the text/line art settings. The former will probably give a scan that has insufficient contrast, giving you dark grey text on light gray background. The latter will probably be strict black/white settings (1-bit encoding) and therefore give a jagged fax-like look (which might look OK if you know how to increase color depth and apply some smoothing/blurring in the postprocess phase).

Scan the page

Select the scan area manually (some scanners propose automatic cropping — check if it works). If you want to inline your pencast, you should crop as close to the text as possible, as white margins above or below the text would combine to look like wider spaces between lines. Then click the ’scan’ button.

Save the resulting file as greyscale (8-bit) .jpg format (or 24-bit color if there is something special about the color). Choose a relatively high quality factor, otherwise you will see ripply compression artefacts near the letters, as .jpg compression is not nice with sharp edges.

Repeat for each page.

Edit the images

It might be that the result of the scan is not perfect. In that case, you may want to edit the images in a photo editing tool. For instance, you can crop, resample or rotate the image, or enhance brightness and contrast. Just remember that if you need to pencast frequently, it will be wiser to spend more time optimising the scan parameters (and to save them as a scan profile) rather than fiddling with photo edits each time you have a new text to scan.

(don’t) Concatenate the pages

That’s what I did at first, as I wanted to have my pencast appear as a tall continuous page. But I found out I had rather have five images sitting on top of one another that download relatively rapidly, instead of a single large image file that takes ages to download.

Import the images in the blog post

Finally, all you need to do is create a blog post and import the image, either as thumbnails (what I did with my first pencast), or as full-size inline images sitting on top of one another (what I did with my other pencasts).

Stay tuned for…

• Pros and cons of pencasting
• Pencasting tricks — basic: crop, resample, highlight/shadow
• Pencasting tricks — intermediate: advanced scan settings, colorize
• Pencasting tricks — advanced: cheat with crossings-out

Examples

Pencast posts at mandarine’s
Emily’s pencast
If anybody else has pencast examples, or if you do one, please leave a comment, I’ll add a link.

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