kitsunebi

Here is the second of two Shining and the Darkness guides (or Shining in the Darkness, as it's known in the USA). Not sure why the name was changed, since it also changes the meaning. If I had been asked, I would have called it "The Shining and The Darkness," but at least I can be grateful it isn't "The Shining Darkness," which doesn't make much sense. ... Don't tell anyone, but sometimes I struggle to come up with anything meaningful to say when I post this stuff... https://archive.org/details/shiningandthedarknessofficialguidebook

It's been a while since I've scanned any USA mags, but my impression is that they have much larger fonts than the mags I'm used to. So smaller sizes are probably adequate. But since you'll be editing some Dengeki PlayStations, I want to warn you that 2200 is probably not good enough. There are many different font sizes throughout the mags, of course, and 2200 is fine for some of them, but for the smaller fonts, it just isn't good enough (there's a reason that 300dpi is the recommended size for OCRing alphabetic text, but for Japanese text, 600dpi is recommended). Let me explain the comparison picture I'm posting below. In the center is a bit of text from a 2200 Swatpro. On the left is a bit of text from a Dengeki PlayStation which I saved at 2200. As you can see, after reducing the DP page to 2200, the text was much smaller than the Swatpro text (since the actual print on the page is smaller), so for comparison's sake, I then increased the scale of the DP text until it matched the Swatpro text in size when side by side (the pic on the right.) The results are not good. This text is on the smaller side, but it is NOT fine print, and is meant to be read (it's the caption for a picture), but at 2200 it's quite blurry (albeit readable). I realize that I'm usually the only one dealing with Japanese text, but since you've got 4 in the pipeline, I caution you to make sure that everything is crisp, because unlike the few simple lines of an alphabetic character, you're dealing with characters that sometimes have upwards of 10, 15, even 20 or more strokes. And ironically are usually printed smaller than their alphabetic counterparts. Btw, here's another pic, again using a picture caption which has been sized to match Swatpro's font size. This time, the picture is included as well (a reader's postcard.) The postcard is rendered almost completely illegible at 2200px, and in all honesty would probably be hard to read at anything under 600dpi (though it could be argued that it's impossible to read on the magazine page itself unless you have eagle vision or a magnifying glass).

Btw, I just wanted to point out that it's very likely that the only reason you could save at 3280 using compression 9 or 10 and get an average of 2MB per page is because you were editing jpgs that were scanned on a flatbed originally. E-Day can back me up here, but using a higher quality scanner (like the Scansnap) results in larger files (more quality=more data). To show you what I mean, I took a page from the scan I'm editing now (6049px high) and saved it at quality level 9 in two sizes. 2200 px high resulted in a 1.6MB file. Saving at 3280 resulted in a 4.8MB file. So using files coming from a quality scanner, there would be no way to save at 3280 and get an average of 2MB per page, unless the pages were mostly text and the editor overcranked the white levels, erasing all texture from the page.

The reason I provided screenshots was to give a concrete example of how there IS a visible difference between 2200 and (in this case) 2700...obviously the difference will be more exaggerated the larger you go (as the 600dpi pic showed). I don't see the point in changing the size based on the length of the mag. Either bigger is better (in which case you're screwing the quality of longer magazines by saving them at a smaller size), or else bigger doesn't matter (in which case you're unnecessarily bloating the size of shorter mags by saving them larger). If a size (be it 2200 or 3200 or 6200) is determined to be better, then it would be better for all mags, regardless of length. One thing I haven't considered since I have no way of testing it is...what do these scan resolutions look like on a 4k monitor?