Scanning Hallicrafters manuals for BAMA - was originally Re: [Hallicrafters] SX-117 Help

[Kenneth D. Grimm, K4XL]

Before Wayne drops the "off topic" hammer on this thread, let me suggest
that you are all correct.  If I were maintaining BAMA for the simple
purpose of displaying the manuals on the CRT screen, I would have
everything scanned at 75 dpi, gray scale, and jpg or gif.  My disk
storage space problems would be nonexistent!  However, many if not most,
of the BAMA users want to print out a copy of the manual to use on the
workbench.  Then the need for 300 dpi scanning arises.

Uncompressed jpg gives the clearest representation of photos and gif is
used for everything else to save disk space.  I also convert scans to
either 2 color (black and white) or gray scale before saving as gifs.
Gifs of 256 colors or millions of colors are huge and don't carry any
more information than a similar sized jpg file.  So there is a lot of
juggling and file manipulation that goes as I try to get the files in a
manual to the smallest size possible without losing essential
information.

I used to believe that DjVu was the wave of the future.  It produced a
greatly reduced file size over the more popular PDF format.  However,
Lizard Tech, who was supposed to maintain the free product after
acquiring the technology from AT&T have definitely dropped the
ball...preferring to push their commercial products instead.  This makes
my attitude toward the much larger files of PDF a little more positive.
8*)

The preferred method of submitting manuals to BAMA is in the form of raw
gifs, jpgs, tiff, or even pcx and other formats.  I will sometimes do a
little "clean up" of the scans before posting them on BAMA.  After
straightening and cleaning the files they can then be encapsulated in
either DjVu or PDF.  Files that are already converted to DjVu or PDF
which are skewed or which have dirty spots I rarely have the time to
correct.  The process of converting the files back from DjVu to bitmap
or from PDF to PostScript eps format is just too time consuming.  If
someone is going to submit a PDF file, I really appreciate it if they
also submit the raw graphics as well.  If they haven't taken the time or
lack the software to clean up the scans, I can usually do that rather
quickly.

To keep this marginally on topic, you might be interested to know that
the manual for the Hallicrafters S-19R was the first manual stored on
BAMA.  Hallicrafters remains the most comprehensive of the
manufacturer's collections on BAMA.  Many thanks to all of you Hallifans
who have helped make it so.

73,

Ken K4XL
k4xl at arrl.net
*** BoatAnchor Manual Archive ***
On the web at http://bama.sbc.edu or
FTP site info: bama.sbc.edu login: anonymous p/w: youremailadr

John wrote:

> I believe the resizing comes from the scan density, rather than the
> compression  format.
>
> Since a normal SVGA monitor displays about 78 DPI, if you scan at 300
DPI,
> your computer spews out all those pixels, making, in this instance, a
> picture that's almost 4 times as big. This can happen to any type of
> compression format.
>
> John
>
>
>
> At 09:07 PM 9/18/02 -0700, Glen Zook wrote:
> >
> >GIF files often come out with extremely large sheet
> >sizes from what was originally scanned.  One of the
> >programs that is available from BAMA is IfanView.
> >This program is great for getting things automatically
> >back down to the 8.5 X 11 inch page size.
> >
> >JPEG files seem to keep to the same size as the
> >original.  K4XL uses GIF for a lot of things since the
> >file sizes are slightly smaller than JPEG.  However,
> >he usually keeps JPEG for anything that has a photo
> >since it gives a MUCH clearer image than GIF when
> >dealing with B&W photos.
> >
> >I always upload anything to BAMA using JPEG.  However,
> >K4XL often changes the text and a good number of the
> >line drawings over to GIF.
> >
> >Glen, K9STH
> >
> >
> >--- Bill Smith <billsmith at ispwest.com> wrote:
> >
> >I hope you have a file print utility which will size
> >the file to the correct paper size.
> >
> >=====
> >Glen, K9STH