Does anybody wanna help me make .pdf's of Amiga magazines?

[Giorgio_de]

I love looking through my old Amiga magazines like Amiga Power etc, except I only have a few.  They hardly ever come up on ebay so I was thinking it would be a good idea to make PDF files out of all the ones I have.  Like one issue is one file and we could have them all together on some site so we can look through them all.

I have a small number of magazines but they are in good quality, so while they are still in good quality I reckon I could do that and share them (unless it infringes copywrite).  I can do all the issues of The One Amiga from April 1994-July 1995 and I have a bunch of Amiga Power issues but I'd have to try to find them.

Does anybody else want to help, or think it is a good idea?

[Giorgio_de]

I searched google and I found a few forums with similar ideas to mine, some are quite old (2002) so is there actually somewhere where you can get them all already?  It would be pretty handy if there was, even if the pdf's are like 10mb each.  

[SilvrDrgn]

Well, obviously, they could be scanned in .... but what would you use to convert the scanned images to PDF?

[BoingBoss]

Hi Giorgio_de,

Does anybody else want to help, or think it is a good idea?

I would like to help and I think it is a wonderful idea.   :-D

I personally enjoy looking through the AmigaWorld issues that were released between 1986 to 1989.  I am using an HP scanner to scan the pages, but I first have to very carefully cut each magazine binding off, so that I can lay each page flat on the scanner.  The scanned pages look really good and are easy to read.  Right now I am trying to decide if I want to scan each magazine or just the articles.  American magazines contain about 80% advertisements, this is why I only buy European magazines.  I do not waste my hard-earned money on American magazines.  Anyway, since each issue of AmigaWorld contains about 80% advertisements, do I really want to scan all of those ads?  Did any of you guys actually read those old ads?  Or did you buy the magazines to read the articles and skim past the ads?   :roll:

[blobrana]

Hum,
whats wrong with html?

Sounds like a great idea if you can get the permission...(no reason why not )

[Giorgio_de]

Well I'm used to 33% ads in the UK and I rather liked all the Amiga related ones, but ones for acne cleansing face wash aren't really that great!

I'm glad somebody likes the idea.  I wasn't aware (didn't think) we'd have to cut the magazines up.  I'd cry if I had to do that, I love my small collection of The One Amiga.

One of the searches of Google found this link: http://eab.abime.net/archive/index.php/t-6330.html

the guy in it says he was doing the scanning thing to make PDF's.  He also suggested contacting the original owners for the quark files of each magazine.  Is that even possible?  Considering they are now worthless to everybody except us.

[leirbag28]

@BoingBoss  
&
@Giorgio de

 I think if one is going to scan a magazine that they should scan the WHOLE magazine with articles and all............I personally bought Amiga Magazines for the Ads of upcoming games and stuff..............Also it will help people remember what was going on at the times these magazines were released.................it's very important to include the ads so that we can see tha magazines exactly as we remembered them................I even have a few comic books that had an ad at the back cover of the Commodore 64 and the Ghost Busters game..............WOW!  I only keep this comic book because of that!  it brings me to a place in time in the 1980's that I can only remember when I see this ad. It even matters if its not Amiga or Commodore related.

 Preserve the WHOLE magazine I say. :-)

P.S. I was just thinking of reading some Amiga magazines before I came on here to Amiga.org.......funny how things work out.Im gonna go read some right now..............I always discover new things that I didn's know before a well as products for the Amiga that I never knew existed.

[cecilia]

SilvrDrgn wrote:
but what would you use to convert the scanned images to PDF?

well, i have acrobat (Duh!) as these are all going to be images, you just import the pics one by one. easy peasy.
the "trick" is to scan the pages so they are the same size and big enough so the text is not blurry.

[minator]

but what would you use to convert the scanned images to PDF?

Find someone who has a Mac running OS X.
When you select "Print" you have to option of saving as a PDF.

On the PC you'll need something with a PDF export function (I think Photoshop has this).

[Krusher]

Actually it's not a bad idea, it's a nice way to recapture the moments and lost articles  :-D

I know that I bought serveral issues of several magazines back in the days, mostly UK I figure (Amiga Format?) but some German and Dutch too, but honoustly I can't remember their titles anymore.




Same goes with the C64, but from that I remember one thing though:

It's from the 80', almost like the Yellow pages, only thicker paper and much thinner.

[d]Oh and a German company which started with tapes??[/d]

My mind figured the last one out, it was Input 64 :-D

BTW why is striketrough [ d ] ? I'm used to  :-?

[JimS]

I've considered this for some time... I decided that scanning at 150dpi was good enough to read the text without making the images too large. I just keep the images for each issue together in a directory structure. I've done some tests, and find that my OCR software doesn't really like the 150dpi scans, so I haven't really bothered to convert to any searchable form. I plan to make a database sometime... maybe. :-)

A friend of mine found a repairable scanner with autofeed. So  I can just cut the spine off with a utility knife and steel ruler. Feed the stack thru once for the even pages, flip over for the odds. I wrote a little visual basic program to renumber the raw files up by 2 or down by 2 to put them in correct order.

My main reason for doing this was to save the space used up by all that paper. 20 CDs take up a lot less space than half a dozen milk crates. :-)

[cecilia]

minator wrote:

but what would you use to convert the scanned images to PDF?

Find someone who has a Mac running OS X.
When you select "Print" you have to option of saving as a PDF.

On the PC you'll need something with a PDF export function (I think Photoshop has this).

yes, but that means making a pdf for every page!
yes, I know you can import pdf's INTO a pdf (eventually making one pdf for an issue), but what I'm saying is that this will take up more space.

i think it's better to scan to jpgs (pdf's like jpgs) and then load up the jpgs into one pdf.

of course, if it's earier to do it the other way, go for it! :-P

[Hyperspeed]

HTML is better.

Each image could have a link to a 300-dpi super size picture and the
text could be searchable for keywords.

I think a distributed effort needs to take place over a few months to
preserve our heritage!

Maybe 10x people could be given a set of rules (governing
Scanquix/ScanMagic settings) and standards set, and then each gets 10
pages to work on over the time period.

Maybe it could be uploaded to Aminet, noone is going to complain about
copyright anymore. Even Amiga Format closed 4yrs ago.

Might be worth e-mailing Future Publishing though, see if they have
Postscript/Quark Express files.

:-)

[ent0mbed]

I would consider being part of this idea.  I still have all of my old Amiga magazines (probably around 65-70 issues spanning about 5 years: 1989-1994 sound about right?).  I think .pdf is a cool idea, but it is true that to do a good quality one of an entire magazine will result in a pretty large file.  It's hard to say what will work best.  I'd probably lean towards the individual .jpgs so that someone can choose via thumbnails which ones they want to view (that's assuming you want high quality scans...)

[Giorgio_de]

The jpg thumbnails would be also a very good idea, we could keep each page numbered and each issue in a particular folder (can we upload to Aminet, Hyperspeed?).  That way it would be accessable to all us Amiga lovers.

 I want to take action because my first ever issue of The One has gotten rather tatty from so much use, and I don't want to see the others ending up the same, it would be great to have a resource for viewing them all in good condition.


Again though before we decide on anything, we have to remember that other people have done this (see the earlier link I posted) so we'd best check to see if it hasn't already been done (perhaps on a smaller scale with just one particular magazine scanned and PDF'd).  Is there any other main Amiga forums we can contact?