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Commodore Book collection reworking project

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RCtech:
A short time ago I got a lot of books in PDF format for commodore computers, as usually all scanned pages. Yesterday I found a very good OCR software (for Intel Macs) which creates text files from scanned PDF's. The quality of the text recognizion is rather good (also depending of the scan quality), but there are layout problems, especially if there are more columns or unusual font types.

Because I have a lot of books it would take too long to rework all the books, so I want to ask if some forum users will help me to correct the scanned text and rework the layout. I could create books with images from it using a DTP program. The rework has a lot of advantages, the files are smaller (a 420 page scanned book takes 27 MB, as rtf text file 724K) and of course they're searchable. So they're ideal for eBook-Readers and Tablet PC's.

This is my list of C128 Books only:

Osborne McGraw-Hill:
 
 C128 Programming Secrets
 Your Commodore 128

SAM's:

The Official Book For The Commodore 128
C128 Assembly Language Programming
Hardware books: C128 flat, 1571, 1581

Tab Books Inc.:

1001 Things to do with your Commodore 128
Advanced C128 Graphics And Sound Programming
C128 Data File Programming

Abacus:

C128 Internals
C128 Tips And Tricks
C128 Peeks And Pokes
C128 1571 Internals

Compute:

First Book Of C128
Second Book Of C128
C128 Machine Language For Beginners
C128 Programmer's Guide
Mapping The Commodore 128

Other:

C128 Programmers Reference Guide (Bantam/Commodore)
How to get the most out of Basic 8 (by Dave Krohne and Roger Silva)
The Black Book of C-128 (Robert H. & Dell Taylor)
The C128 Subroutine Library (Bantam)
Tips & Tricks for Commodore Computers (Windcrest)

If anyone is interested I can upload them, if you have other books, I'm interested too ;-)

maraud:
I can chip in and do one.  Pick a small one - that way I can see just how much effort it takes.

RCtech:
I'll actually converting the books I have and will upload them all to my mediafire account. But you can skip the idea of 'a small one' - the books are from 250 to 750 pages. What the hell you can put in a 1571 internal book with 516 pages???

I attached some images so you can see what you could expect. The pictures are direct screenshots from my PDF viewer and the text editor, without any modification.

RobertB:

--- Quote from: Naquaada on August 02, 2011, 05:16 PM ---This is my list of C128 Books only...
--- End quote ---
     Are you sure these books are not already scanned/archived by David Haynes at http://www.bombjack.org/commodore ?

          Back in California,
          Robert Bernardo
          Fresno Commodore User Group
          http://videocam.net.au/fcug

RCtech:
Great page, didn't know it. But it's the same, all books are scanned. My idea should be a rework of the books to real text form. This will make the books much smaller and they are searchable. The scan/text conversion is done by the OCR software rather well, but the files have to be corrected, layouted with graphics and recreated as text PDF. Or in ebook format for ebook readers. Another, much bigger effort would be to translate them from English to different languages...

For people who are scanning books or have scanned material and can't create a PDF from it there's another interesting format: The Comic Book Archives. They are extremely simple to create: Create a folder, put in the pictures and rename it with a counting number, f.e. page_001.jpg, page_002.jpg etc. There are batch renamers which can do this. Subfolders are also supported. After this create an archive from the main folder, and rename the suffix depending on the archive type: .cbr (comic book RAR) .cbz (comic book ZIP). That's all. There are more archive types available, but these are the most common. You can optimize files, if you have b/w scans batch convert them to GIF, that's a good lossless format for black and white text. There are many graphic files supported (often text document types, too), and you can mix them w/o problems, only the names have to be in the correct order.

Comic Book Archives can be read with Comic Book Readers, they're available for every actual operating system. I had these things on my Android Tablet, that was great. Comic Book Archives are sometimes faster as PDF's with scanned graphics.

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