Date   : Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:38:28 +0100
From   : dm.hunt@... (David Hunt)
Subject: The Micro User

> On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 12:20:40PM +0100, Dave Moore wrote:
> > I'll take them, as I know someone who is willing to scan in old TMUs (he
> > actually has a great track record in scanning old retro mags!).
> 
> On a related note, does anyone have any advice on nondestructively
> scanning old mags like these?
> 
> I've got an almost complete collection of Acorn Users from 1982-1993,
> and I'd like to make decent scans of them for archival purposes at
> some point.
> 
> How do people handle the curvature introduced by perfect binding, and
> what file formats/resolutions are regarded as adequate?
> 
> I know Al Kossow (at <http://bitsavers.org>) prefers 400 dpi scans
> saved nonlosslessly because OCR packages tend not to like the
> artifacts introduced by JPEG compression. This would get a bit
> unweildy for full colour images though. Is JPEG2000 better in this
> regard?

I've scanned 16 Micro Users from Vol.1 No.1 to Vol.2 No.4. I will get around
to scanning some more at the w/e - just got to find where the scanner has
got to... Only 120ish to go...

The later MUs are so thick, that it is difficult to scan them, without
introducing some curvature on the pages. I tried cutting one of the
magazines, of which I had a duplicate, and put it through a automatic
document scanner. The scanner ate quite a few of the pages, the guy told me
it probably doesn't like thin, shiny paper! I did toy with the idea of two
cameras at 90 degrees to each other, taking pictures like a book reader, but
it didn't work very well, you'd need 12MP cameras with large lenses.

I sent them as 300dpi/24bit colour & 300dpi/8bit greyscale PNGs to Dave
Moore on DVDs and he put them up on his acornpreservation website. A colour
image weighs in at around 20Mb, a grayscale image at 5Mb. An average MU will
consume around 2Gb, just as well disc space is dirt cheap ;)

I have a few MUs missing, but they're much later ones from the 1990s

If there are other people willing to scan MUs, then we should get together
and parallelize our efforts. Other people could OCR the scanned MUs so we
could finally have a searchable database of MU articles, diagrams,
programmes etc.

Cheers

Dave