Transactor November 1987: Volume 8, Issue 3 (PDF)

The other day, I found this at WeirdStuff:


Transactor November 1987: Volume 8, Issue 3
(27MB)

Click on the image above for the PDF. It is the original scan, but it is fully searchable in your favorite PDF reader, you can extract text, and the entries in the table of contents are hyperlinks.

I know Craig Bruce has scans online, but I find searchable PDFs a lot more useful than single images on a website. Search engines are even going to index this issue!

Some background: The pages have been downsampled to 196 dpi (which was the native resolution of the press) to get rid of MoirĂŠ patterns. The color pages have been converted into CMYK, and every channel’s curve has been adjusted to get rid of unwanted parts of the histogram. All images are JPEG compressed greyscale – while this is not optimal for printing (although you can scale the images up and then convert them to B/W with quite good results), it looks better than monochrome/G4 in most viewers, and works well with pages that combine text and graphics. I’m open to input on how to improve the quality or get the size down more.

4 thoughts on “Transactor November 1987: Volume 8, Issue 3 (PDF)”

  1. Oh my … you PDFized the whole thing?! This is a required download. I still remember the thrill of finding this magazine, and devouring every page of every issue … accumulating info available nowhere else that would help me do a better job of programming my trusty C64! The Transactor blew Compute’s Gazette away … which was saying a lot in those days ;^)

  2. Very impressive work, could you please list which tools you used to generate the searchable PDF ?

  3. @tormod: ABBYY FineReader is an OCR tool that takes, among other things, separate pictures as input and writes a searchable PDF with the original pictures being displayed – this is called PDF/A. With the same tool I could have generated HTML or RTF, but I find the searchable-picture-PDF format the most useful (and authentic!) one.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.