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Scanning a Braille Playboy

Jason Scott guest-posted on the Internet Archive blog last night, and he wrote about how he got the IA to scan and archive an old copy of Playboy.

Why do it? Curiosity, for one. When compared to most books scanned by the IA, this is an unusual challenge. I wouldn’t  have been sure that the scanning process would work on braille, or that the output would be legible.But apparently I underestimated the expertise of the IA.

I’ve never seen one before and I always wondered what it looked like. I’m not sure that this one came through  all that well. The subtle physical differences in the height of the dots aren’t easy to see onscreen.

You can find the copy on archive.org. There’s no centerfold, so anyone who subscribes to the braille edition of Playboy clearly got it for the articles.

via IA

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