I’ll confess, I haven’t scanned a map in about a month. I’ve been working from a backlog of scans I made and posting them (including the upcoming Friday map).
After the big crash which killed my hard drive and my backup drive, my windows system would not recognize my scanner. It recognized it before, but somewhere in the windows reinstall the thing got borked. And it remains borked. So I have to boot into Linux to scan, and I’m inherently lazy, so rarely do so.
Turns out that my scanner is screwing up now too.
This is the best scan I managed of the map for the One Page Dungeon contest – if this were a scan of one of my pencil maps I’d be happy with it, but I’ve never had one of my inked maps come out this rough, or as inconsistent in shade and texture. I’m really pretty bummed about this as it may end up requiring that I pick up a new scanner to get back into the swing of things.
The Worm's Gullet
I was originally going to post the whole one page dungeon today, but I’ve spent the last three hours tweaking with the scanner and software and am just burned out.
And I have to get some real work done for that person who pays my bills.
I can feel your pain, I have an HP Photosmart 110 Scanner, every few days I have to un-install / re-install the drivers to make it work, plus I mashed up a flash drive with most of my work on it recently. Losing data (especially creative work) just bites.
You might try grabbing a copy of VirtualBox. It’s free virtual machine software (created by Sun, now owned by Oracle) that can run Windows or Linux. You could install a light Windows or Linux VM and attach the scanner to the VM (there’s a nice software switch to do that) which would allow you to scan. You could host it either on Windows or Linux and you can run either Windows or Linux. It’s nice. 🙂
LOL… if this website and your troves of maps and tables and characters is evidence of your “inherently laziness” then what hope is there for the rest of us?
Good luck with the scanner issue… at least if you have to get a new scanner the printer/scanner combos that are out there at the moment are both relatively high quality and lowish cost.
G/l on fixing the scanner issue or getting a new one.
Your “laziness” is still perfection compared to anything I could do, so take heart!
Just chalk the scan quality up to Old School, like the maps we have seen some publishers do (and not even as well) in the distant past 😉