[sdiy] Original ARP Service Manuals

[Dave Manley]

Andre Majorel wrote:
> On 2009-01-12 10:52 -0800, Dave Manley wrote:
>
>   
>> What is the best way to merge several scans of a large schematic
>> into a  single composite file?  I've used some panoramic image
>> stitching  software in the past, but it was tedious, and there
>> must be an easier way.
>>     
>
> You can do it with a general purpose bitmap editor like Gimp but
> it's fiddly. Once, it got me so frustrated that I made a shell
> script calling pnmcut and pnmcat and repeatedly adjusted the
> numbers and re-ran the script the script until it was right.
>
> A specialised tool is needed. Load several images, zoom on where
> the edges meet and let you adjust interactively each image's x-
> and y-offset. There's none that I know of. I've been on the edge
> of writing one a few times, but so far, laziness has won.
>
>   
The tool I used was Hugin (also tried Panavue which seems to be based on 
Hugin).  It allows you to import multiple images, set the number of rows 
and columns of "sub-images", set common registration points on 
overlapping parts of the image, and then automatic stitching of the 
images into one.

Hugin is free, but more of a pain to use than Panavue, which isn't free.

With either the process is slow and tedious.  The results were good, but 
there has to be a better, more automated, way.

-Dave

P.S.  It'd be nice to have some free, effective, simple watermarking 
software also.