Digitizing “The Yoga of Patanjali”
End of January Benjamin, a friend of mine, sent me a scanned version of a booklet of Master EK (Ekkirala Krishnamacharya) which is no more available in print, at least in the West: “Triangles. An Esoteric Approach”. It is a nice booklet; I had read it about 20 years ago.
I told Benjamin that before putting it online on the WTT website, I would like to speak to Kulapathi Editions, the Indian publisher of Master EK’s books. So I had a hearty Zoom talk with Raju, who takes care of the publications. He agreed that we might organise scans of Master EK’s books which are not digitally available and do as-is reproductions of the print version. And we said that M. EK’s “The Yoga of Patanjali” would be a good starting point, since it also contains the yoga sutras in Sanskrit.
I only had my private copy left; so I sent it to Benjamin. It wasn’t in a good condition. I scanned the cover, cleaned the artefacts and shared it with Benjamin.
Last Sunday we met in an online meeting. There was some noise and someone of the group asked, “Hey, Benjamin, what are you doing?” He replied, “Cutting the Yoga of Patanjali book.” Then he switched his camera on and showed the cover and the pages of the book – apart.
Last Monday, he sent the scanned version, writing:
I did a deep digitizing test with the EK book “The Yoga of Patanjali”. The original book came in a bad quality, but it was the last exemplar you could find. So better than none and a perfect test object for getting a good quality also with heavily used material.
The goal was to find an automated process with a minimum of manual (time intensive) operations and most important: a high quality result.
As predicted the scan without OCR produced huge files much bigger than 100 MB. With Ghostscript compressing techniques I got a 14MB PDF with a nice cover.
I wrote down the complete process for imitation by others. Feel free to distribute the attached PDFs.
Since Benjamin always does things very carefully, he wrote a step-by-step guide to scanning the books. He mainly works on Linux systems, he used free software for the entire process – And the book was very well done; he had cleaned all pages automatically.
So I uploaded the PDFs of the two books – here is the one on Triangles – An Esoteric Approach, and here The Yoga of Patanjali. Profound food for thought. Let me know in case you want to scan another book as proposed – I might send you a copy.
Last Tuesday, I received a parcel from São Paulo, Brazil. It contained several books of Master EK, including a paper version of “The Yoga of Patanjali”. Six years ago, I had sent the books to a friend. She told me she no longer needed them and thus returned them, saying “Certainly someone will be interested”. An incredible coincidence.
February 27th, 2021 at 11:00 am
Dear Ludger,
That’s a really great job for the whole WTT. Thank you very much for your great work.
Best regards Herwig
February 27th, 2021 at 9:42 pm
Thank you Herwig – yes, the work was done by Benjamin, I just arranged that it could come out. May other helpers join in this work.