How to make graphical text more readable

[hazel]

I found on the web an image of an obituary which I believe to be that of my great-grandfather. It is written in German, in the gothic script. The image is a jpeg and to small to read.

I tried enlarging it in the gimp, using the sine transform and I could just make out the odd word here and there but not much. Tools like sharpen and despeckle didn't seem to improve the image much.

Given that this is a plain black and white image with no half-tones, there should be a simple way to make the letters stand out enough to be legible, but I don't know enough about graphics and graphical terminology to work out what it might be.

[elija]

Maybe one of the edge filters combined with sharpen?

[hazel]

I tried that and it didn't help much. I did get a slightly better enlargement using cubic scaling rather than sinc; it enabled me to puzzle out one or two more words, including the date of death and "nach schweren Leiden" (after great suffering) which makes me suspect that the poor guy may have died of cancer - it's practically hereditary in my father's family. But what I would really like to know is the place names and the names of the family members who filed the notice and you can't easily guess names.

[alanwall]

I tried that and it didn't help much. I did get a slightly better enlargement using cubic scaling rather than sinc; it enabled me to puzzle out one or two more words, including the date of death and "nach schweren Leiden" (after great suffering) which makes me suspect that the poor guy may have died of cancer - it's practically hereditary in my father's family. But what I would really like to know is the place names and the names of the family members who filed the notice and you can't easily guess names.

use Inkscape to enlarge using import

[MikeTbob]

What about scanning it at very high pixels and resolution?? I had an image that I couldn't see who all was in it, so I scanned it to something outrageous amd that helped.

[hazel]

What about scanning it at very high pixels and resolution?? I had an image that I couldn't see who all was in it, so I scanned it to something outrageous amd that helped.

How do I scan a digital image? I don't have hard copy of this notice - if I did, I could read it directly. Or do you mean I should print it out (the print-out will be illegible of course) and then try to scan it in again?

[MikeTbob]

How do I scan a digital image? I don't have hard copy of this notice - if I did, I could read it directly. Or do you mean I should print it out (the print-out will be illegible of course) and then try to scan it in again?

D'oh!
I didn't notice that you had said digital image. If it's too illegible in digital format, scanning it will not help at all. Sorry for the confusion.

[elija]

hazel, I blundered into this today. It may help you out.