Finally done scanning: Waterloo Structured Basic for VIC-20

eslapion · Post by **eslapion** » Sun Sep 06, 2009 11:56 pm

Yes, I know, I took a long time.

Back in december 2007, I was able to get the manual for the Waterloo Structured Basic and it was mostly busy sitting on top of my scanner for the last 20 months.

But now, finally, I'm done scanning it.

I will offer to send it to Zimmers, anyone else who can post it online, feel free to contact me to get the Zip archive file.

All scans are monochrome 300dpi gif files.

Viewing it in Windows XP's preview looks real nice. Everything is perfectly readable.

gklinger · Post by **gklinger** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 12:32 am

Coolness. How would you feel about archiving a copy at DLH's Commodore Archive? The more VIC-20 content, the better.

eslapion · Post by **eslapion** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 12:48 am

gklinger wrote:Coolness. How would you feel about archiving a copy at DLH's Commodore Archive? The more VIC-20 content, the better.

It may be a good idea to send it there but I immediately notice a problem with this archive: everything is in PDF.

Now PDF may be great for structured drawings and text with page layout as PDF is designed around the PostScript page description language but it totally sucks for bitmaps and color photos.

For the latter, it makes files that would normally be quite small absolutely huge and it completely eliminates the ability to recapture these images at another resolution.

Lets say you discover a smudge of a dirty spot on one of the page and you want to fix it with Photoshop or another image manipulation program... well, with PDF, you can't.

I want to publish what I did in a "fixable" format that is also compact. PDF is neither.

DLH · Post by **DLH** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 7:52 am

eslapion wrote:Lets say you discover a smudge of a dirty spot on one of the page and you want to fix it with Photoshop or another image manipulation program... well, with PDF, you can't.

Why not right click on the page and select 'EDIT' and open the page up in Photoshop and edit it?

Huge difference using the free reader and the full professional version. Like using paint versus Photoshop.

http://www.bombjack.org/torrent/editing-a-pdf.jpg

Anyway whatever you decide to release is better than nothing.

Thanks

DLH

(mod: oversized in-line image replaced by link)

eslapion · Post by **eslapion** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 2:44 pm

DLH wrote:Why not right click on the page and select 'EDIT' and open the page up in Photoshop and edit it?

Huge difference using the free reader and the full professional version. Like using paint versus Photoshop.

Correct me if I'm wrong but so far, my experience with opening PDFs in Photoshop says it will "rasterize" the content.

In doing so, Photoshop will ask you at what resolution you want to rasterize and this implies a scaling of the image that's in the PDF. Are you scaling the image up or down? No way to know...

The only way NOT to scale the images you are dealing with is to have a digital photo in the first place.

Now it is possible the pro version of Acrobat allows you to modify the digital photos without rescaling. I have never used that software before.

6502dude · Post by **6502dude** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 7:20 pm

I much prefer source content in non PDF format.

This allows conversion to format of ones choice.

Thanks eslapion for your work on this preservation project.

eslapion · Post by **eslapion** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 9:41 pm

6502dude wrote:Thanks eslapion for your work on this preservation project.

You are most welcome.

Bacon · Post by **Bacon** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 11:43 pm

Why not find somewhere to host the images and send them to DLH so he can make a PDF?

Depending on the size of the images, I might be able to host them. For actual use of a scanned book I prefer PDF, but it's always good to have the original images around.

Bacon · Post by **Bacon** » Mon Sep 07, 2009 11:52 pm

eslapion wrote:
DLH wrote:Why not right click on the page and select 'EDIT' and open the page up in Photoshop and edit it?

Huge difference using the free reader and the full professional version. Like using paint versus Photoshop.
Correct me if I'm wrong but so far, my experience with opening PDFs in Photoshop says it will "rasterize" the content.

In doing so, Photoshop will ask you at what resolution you want to rasterize and this implies a scaling of the image that's in the PDF. Are you scaling the image up or down? No way to know...

The only way NOT to scale the images you are dealing with is to have a digital photo in the first place.

Now it is possible the pro version of Acrobat allows you to modify the digital photos without rescaling. I have never used that software before.

Yes, Acrobat Pro allows you to open the individual images fo editing in an extenal editor without resizing them. If you don't have Acrobat Pro you can always use ImageMagick to extract individual images from a pdf (and a host of other image manipulation tasks). It's a suite of command line programs but that shouldn't be a problem for any Commodore user

ImageMagick is released under a GPL compatible license so it's free both as in beer and as in speech.

DLH · Post by **DLH** » Tue Sep 08, 2009 8:53 am

If anyone has these scans please email them to me or I can provide an ftp.

After all the hopla I am really curious to see them.

Oh well... back to my creating my pdf's with searchable OCR.

DLH

eslapion · Post by **eslapion** » Tue Sep 08, 2009 5:26 pm

Bacon wrote:...If you don't have Acrobat Pro you can always use ImageMagick to extract individual images from a pdf (and a host of other image manipulation tasks). It's a suite of command line programs but that shouldn't be a problem for any Commodore user

ImageMagick is released under a GPL compatible license so it's free both as in beer and as in speech.

Cool!

eslapion · Post by **eslapion** » Tue Sep 29, 2009 10:48 pm

* bump *

BTW, I am still at a loss as to how to send those huge files...

Anybody can make a suggestion or give a hand?

Bacon · Post by **Bacon** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 12:06 am

eslapion wrote:* bump *

BTW, I am still at a loss as to how to send those huge files...

Anybody can make a suggestion or give a hand?

In Linux I'd use the split command to split them up into chunks small enough to mail. The receiver could then use cat to put them together again.

In Windows I think you can use WinZIP to make a zip file and at the same time split it up into smaller chunks.

Where are you going to send it?

gklinger · Post by **gklinger** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 4:57 pm

eslapion wrote:BTW, I am still at a loss as to how to send those huge files...

How do you mean? You want somewhere to host them or you're trying to figure out how to get them from point A to point B?

eslapion · Post by **eslapion** » Thu Oct 01, 2009 7:31 pm

gklinger wrote:
eslapion wrote:BTW, I am still at a loss as to how to send those huge files...
How do you mean? You want somewhere to host them or you're trying to figure out how to get them from point A to point B?

I mean I have those files and I would like to send them to DLH as well as to Bo Zimmerman but they are more than 10Mbytes and will not go through e-mail and when using Explorer to try and send them via FTP, this thing tells me the filename is unnaceptable...

So... I'm stuck!