Flat Earth Memories

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The picture shows the early model

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The picture dates from 1978...

Anyone remember the Arcam TV Tuner? A really neat bit of kit. I ended up building myself a Maplin kit to do the same thing. Now you can get an entire VCR with Nicam outputs for less than that cost as a crude looking kit of parts.

Paul

I hope those back issues can be viewed I'd love to read them also. Can you turn them into Acrobat .pdf format? It condenses the file to something manageable and you can then string them together for each issue.
cheers

glenn

For the record - to create PDF files you can do it with Ghost Script/Ghostview - you do not have to use Distiller

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

for more info

Derek

easier still if you got a mac with OSX. PDF creation is part of the system. Just have to print to PDF.

Quick and easy.

BTW, I agree that this would be the best format to use for this.

A PDF of a bitmap is still a bitmap. Unless you do OCR and break the pages up into text and images I think PDF is a waste of effort. Transforming the paper magazines into chains of sensible PDF will be a huge undertaking.

Anyway this is a fairly large example of a piece of classic TFR. If I squash it or compress it more it becomes even harder to read.



Paul

I agree with you Paul about PDFing a bit map. One remaining advantage though is that it is possible to put together multiple pages and have one file per article instead of having to open 4 html pages or files in order to read a 4 pages article.

The Flat response on the flatresponse.net are fantastic but browsing the site is a real pain...

anyways, let's keep on thinking about the idea!

Philippe

It's trivial to write some HTML to make a frame with contents on the left and pages on the right. Issues could be bundled into zip files.

IIRC there are 11 issues of TFR, I have 9 scanned as above. That only took a few evenings. Scanning Hifi Review would be a much greater labour of love.... I'll get the other two TFRs done this week and perhaps put up a test issue.

Copyright is a tricky issue. I'd feel unhappy about selling facsimiles, but putting imperfect scans of tatty originals up on a reasonably discreet web site seems morally OK if strictly legally dodgy.

Paul

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tatty originals up on a reasonably discreet web site seems morally OK if strictly legally dodgy

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Yes but oh so desireable. Can't see what's wrong if these guys are out of business. Since I'm over the pond I'm not sure. Again PDFs are the best choice, don't know if scanners can go directly to PDF. but I know photoshop can. And acrobat will let you compile into several page documents. More involved tho so that might be out. Probably the first resistance would be a "cease and desist" order.

Morals schmorals--- I really wanna read the SBL and 72 reviews!!


PS-- I did NOT have sexual relations with that woman...

what a really good topic this has turned out
to be!.as a past reader of HFR it reminds of my old Planar3 days.the scans of covers,articles are very good and i look forward to catching some of my favourite reviews.the turntable shootout is fondly remembered as an aspiring LP12 admirer!.

dennis

So......No takers on the initiative!?

Good idea guys, good thread also!!

Mat

Ok then,

what shall be done? Let's identify the tasks and find people to split up the work.


Articles and rights
-Identify the targeted publications/articles
-Identify who owns what magazines/articles and see if they have ascanner
-Have people contact the targeted magazines to ask for permission

Web-site
-find a web site with enought bandwith allocation (and low $)
-agree on a format for scanning/packaging the articles
-Get a avolunteer to format the site and receive the submissions from the people who have packaged the articles

Any taker?

I can try to find a web site and domain-naim on the cheap. However, let's first test the ground with magazine publishers or owner about the rights.

I run my own design company and would be willing to format the site and host the files on a satelite of my site www.brandnew.co.uk
I used to have a collection of HiFi Reviews but (stupidly!) ditched them a couple of years ago.
If the relevent scans can be made and sent to me on CD then I can start putting something together.
Bandwidth-wise - If my server starts falling over with all the downloads then maybe we should organise some dedicated space, however I have no problem with getting the ball rolling.

First things first though, lets get permission to reproduce the magazines - It'll be a fair amount of work and I'd like to know that it's all above board to begin with.

Super inkipak

that's one thing done!

Anyone whant to scan an article and test different formats for quality/size/usability?

as suggested above, plain scans converted in jpeg are a possibility, PDF of the scanned pictures regrouped as one file are another.

let's get this going ;-)

Can people email me with a list of the magazine issues they have and I will put together a spreadsheet. I've got most HFR's from about 88 to when they wound up. It would be good if we could establish that we have a full set! I've also got various other magazines (New Hifi Sound, Audiophile, HiFi Answers, HiFi Choice, HFN&RR, etc) with interesting Linn/Naim/Rega etc reviews. Tell me what you've got and what's in them!
John
Ps. the email address is john dot channing at boltblue dot com.

I have a complete run of The Flat Response and scans of 9 of the 11 issues. These are the ones that Rob Holt has on his flatresponse.net site.

It would be trivial for me to put this lot on a CD for anybody who wants to experiment. I plan to add the two missing issues as soon as I can work out where the scanner plugs in.

The scans are 975kb bmps, which I bulk converted to jpg where they average about 250kb. If you compress them more, or reduce the resolution, you tend to lose the detail. Try the 'Linn Man' cartoon on the first page of this thread for an example. Obviously there is room for improvement and optimisation here, but there were a lot of pages even with 9 issues of a slim magazine. I decided to be complete and scan every page including the adverts, routine subscription offers etc.

I also have a complete run of Hifi Review, Hifi Answers from early 1978 till it expired, and then I think all the 'Audiophile's that followed. There will be some HFN and others floating about somewhere.

What would be interesting would be a run of Paul Messenger's 'Subjective Sounds' columns in HFN, from the start where he was discovering active Isobariks in the late 70s, and stuff by Carl Anthony etc in Practical Hifi. Paul Benson wrote some fantastic music columns in Practical Hifi towards the end of its life, before he got a column in HFR and went mad.

Paul

Bhoyo,

yes, this is a good reference and a very interesting site. However, at around 304k per page scanned, I find the usability of the site a bit low. We should find a way to package article in a more efficient and usable way.

my opinion

p.s. John, we could also add some articles from Listener Mag. Mr. Dudley should be quite open with the idea (if he still owns the rights).

The only way to keep the file sizes low is to use an OCR package when scanning the pages - save the text in a .txt file and scan in the images separately. This would then be formatted into HTML.

The downside of this would be the considerable time involved - however, if the scanning/OCR work was spread across a number of people then the whole thing would be a lot less painful.
If the images are the correct resolution to go onto a web page (72 dpi @100%) then most of the labour intensive work would already be done.

The text and image files could then be emailed, speeding things up considerably.

As a suggestion, maybe concentrating on one publication, (HiFi Review for example) would get something worthwhile on the web quickly - and then draw up a bigger plan for the others.

"If the images are the correct resolution to go onto a web page (72 dpi @100%)"

Image dpi is meaningless for web pages. (Which is not very helpful of me but its kind of a personal bugbear).

I'd scan a couple of representative pages, work out how best to fix them in Photoshop and then record an appropriate action and do the lot automatically. You should be able to get a readble magazine page into about 100k I reckon.

The OCR route sounds like a huge amount of extra effort and would problaby just mean you end up with giving up half way through.

Matthew

agree.

let's just find a good balance between "doability" and "usability".

I'd be happy to adjust images etc, I have illustrator, photoshop elements, OSX Jaguar etc.

And now, in colour: Broadband!

Yea hey!

The main reason I stressed the OCR/HTML route is that the completed site would then be searchable by keyword.
Straight scans of the pages would be a lot easier - but more difficult to navigate.

I soppose another plus side of the page scans is that you get to see the original layout.

I'm happy either way - it depends what you want at the end of the day.

I did just compose a detailed post on how converting scans to searchable PDF's is virtually a one-click function in Acrobat 5.

The bloody forum software ate my post though, so instead I'm going to rant about the lack of ergonomics in modern products - bloody pop up windows with no back arrows

Or maybe not - anyway it's piss-easy - if anyone wants to send me a CD with some scans I'll assess the ease and size requirements.

Andy.

Image dpi is meaningless for web pages

It has to be 72~90dpi for original size. I would recommend to scan the whole pages, maybe other people could OCR them. The extra amount of work would just be to read the text through and remove the errors which result during OCR.

Plain text in HTMLs plus embedded JPGs (nicely compressed) downloadable in ZIP-compressed packages would be my favorite methode, have a look at this sample (29kb).