The next week was spent in trial and error, working out a way to (a) digitise the damn thing without trashing it any further than it already was and (b) creating and acceptable digital draft that required the very least of post-editing. It became obvious the scan had to be of sufficiently high quality to sail through the character conversion stage without too many incidents.

Several days later I'd got the scanning time down from all day on the first attempt to just a couple of hours for the whole two hundred pages.

Eventually, after some canny manipulation routines, I arrived at what I considered a smart way of working the problem without degrading the original copy. The result was a digital tranposition with hardly any scanning errors or weird character interpretations.

Was it a success? Yes absolutely! I'd kinda perfected a solution for transposing legacy English literature, printed before the outset of the digital age, to editable digital format.

Will I tell you how I did it? Sorry, not a chance!