wood type

two wood type question:
1) what is the best way to clean old, dried ink from old wood type?
2) is there a way to scan actual wood type and convert it to a useable digital fromat?

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1) I use mineral spirits to clean wood type, it also conditions the type because of the oil base content.

2) Print the type black and scan it as Grayscale in at 300 ppi. Save as a Tiff file then you can bring it in to Adobe Illustrator, Indesign, or Quark and colorize it.

If you want to turn the type to Vector art then you’ll need to scan it in at 1200- 2400 ppi. In Adobe Illustrator CS3 you are able to use Live Trace and then Expand to create the scanned image as Vector.

Good Luck,

Casey
http://www.inkylipspress.com/

Updated. I just used live trace in Illustrator CS2 to convert a hand-drawn logo to a vector image. Unfortunately, the project involving the logo is bound for an offset press.

Casey seems to know more about dealing with this process then I, but I will add my 2 cents.

1200 ppi is fine. Just go through at a very high magnification after you have run live trace and tweak the anchors/handles. Some odd artifacts can appear. I don’t know other graphics programs that well, but live trace is a dream.

Illustrator CS2 (with perhaps some tweaking of the options and some adjustments to the image before hand — if it needs cleaned up) should do it.. I have done this before with other things if you need any help I would be happy to look at the file and see what I can get out of it.. Other wise there are more ways to do it — You can output from photoshop (illustrator curves) and then color it ect.. But its more work than live trace.

Thanks
Angela