Me three. Their search page is still working, though, which is very helpful as it crosses several download sites. -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Guzis [cclist at sydex.com] Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2009 1:22 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: manx is dead? On 26 Sep 2009 at 12:27, Al Kossow wrote: I haven't been able to get a response from bitsavers.vt100.net for the last couple of months either. I've been using the Stuttgart University mirror. --Chuck

On Sun, 2009-09-27 22:28:03 +0200, Pontus <pontus at update.uu.se> wrote: I've been long thinking about scanned documents and the manx database specifically. Some time ago, I got my hands on a scanned pages (multi-page TIFFs, each page containing two book pages) and worked some time on them. It resulted in some script doing cutting/straigthening, reassembling a PDF and OCRing it, placing the text invisibly over the images (so you can cut'n'paste it, depending on the OCR quality of course :) ) I've started working further on it, eg. building some web frontend to add tags (eg. isbn=1234567, author=foo, ...). That's not yet really cool (it's experimentation after all), but I think that could easily be extended to do: * Full-text search on the PDFs. * Help building nice PDFs from scanned images * Maintain a useable metadata index (though I'm not too keen on the tag concept therefor) I'll /not/ publish it yet, nor give public access to my scanned book mentioned above, but I think I'll polish it a bit and offer it. Indexing the bitsavers.org material would be a nice first step. Do you think that would/could be useful for searching all the stuff? (And maybe for re-creating the PDFs with added OCRed text. This, at some time, might be particularly useful if ever scanned microfiche pages show up.) MfG, JBG -- Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw at lug-owl.de +49-172-7608481 Signature of: They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety, the second : deserve neither liberty nor safety. (Ben Franklin)

On Wed, 2009-09-30 11:53:22 -0600, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: I've already seen that, though I'm quite sceptic about the Google stuff. They surely could OCR scanned PDFs, but I'm not sure if they will do that. (That'll bring more copyrighted material into the database, which previously wasn't available as /text/.) OTOH, indexing it after OCRing doesn't rework the PDFs to be more fancy, eg. add a real TOC around the former document, create bibloographic metadata or put the OCRed text nicely into the PDFs. I like Bitsavers a lot (as well as other spread sources of scanned material), but I see those PDFs only as a nice container to have a useable format up to the time where we can do /better/ with the scanned pages. Point is: We now can! The software is all out there, with everything being opensources and free as well. Until now, scanning documents was mainly about conserving the paper and being able to share it without snail-mailing around the stuff, which always also contains the danger of loosing it. But we can now really polish the stuff. That's /not/ a substitute for Bitsavers et al.--we need them. The PDFs over there are a perfect format for archiving the scanned pages. But we'd place generated PDFs next to them, containing real Table of Contents, biblopgraphy entries and possibly even Indices, among the OCRed text. I'd probably just hack my scripts (they're a bit specific for working on one special type of scan I did) and do some test as a start for a Manx2 :) MfG, JBG -- Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw at lug-owl.de +49-172-7608481 Signature of: Wenn ich wach bin, tr?ume ich. the second :

On Wed, 2009-09-30 20:59:06 +0200, Oliver Lehmann <lehmann at ans-netz.de> wrote: Oh... Pages in a really bad shape :( No way... That's where (at least for now) only a human can help. And to be honest, I would have a hard time reading the lower part of http://files.pofo.de/056.png for example... That's great work! What kind of workflow did you use to create the PDF? What tools were involved? I think that, by doing that, you already learned a lot the hard way which others might learn from. Sure--plain text compresses quite good. A distorted, partially randomized image doesn't :) MfG, JBG -- Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw at lug-owl.de +49-172-7608481 Signature of: 17:45 <@Eimann> Hrm, das E90 hat keinen Lebenszeit Call-Time Counter mehr the second : 17:46 <@jbglaw> Eimann: Wof?r braucht man das? 17:46 <@jbglaw> Eimann: F?r mich ist an 'nem Handy wichtig, da? ich mein Gege?ber h?ren kann. Und da? mein Gegen?ber mich versteht... 17:47 <@KrisK> jbglaw: was du meinst ist wodka. 17:47 <@KrisK> jbglaw: es klingelt und man h?rt stimmen

Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote: I can assure you that they HAVE been doing that on bitsavers content for over a year. That was one of the reasons I decided to start converting the content. People were contacting me wondering why the OCRed version wasn't on line.

On Sun, 2009-10-04 21:20:46 +0200, Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw at lug-owl.de> wrote: To place it into public discussion, my li'l script (used to cut 2side scans from multi-page TIFFs and make a nice PDF book of that) basically uses `tiffsplit' to create one-page TIFFs, `convert' to conver to .pbm format, `unpaper' to cut (and straighten) out the two book pages per TIFF/PBM page, then use `ocroscript rec-tess --tesslanguage=en ...' to OCR each simgle page and finally use `HocrConverter.py' [1] to assemble single-page straightened TIFF pages and the HOCR scan results to a PDF. All parts of that software stack is in Debian, except the Hocr stuff (for scanning the pages and generate a file that also contains the position of scanned text on the page). MfG, JBG [1] http://xplus3.net/downloads/HocrConverter.gz, linked from http://xplus3.net/2009/04/02/convert-hocr-to-pdf/ -- Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw at lug-owl.de +49-172-7608481 Signature of: 23:53 <@jbglaw> So, ich kletter' jetzt mal ins Bett. the second : 23:57 <@jever2> .oO( kletter ..., hat er noch Gitter vorm Bett, wie fr?her meine Kinder?) 00:00 <@jbglaw> jever2: *patsch* 00:01 <@jever2> *aua*, wof?r, Gedanken sind frei! 00:02 <@jbglaw> Nee, freie Gedanken, die sind seit 1984 doch aus! 00:03 <@jever2> 1984? ich bin erst seit 1985 verheiratet!

On Sun, 2009-10-04 16:34:56 -0700, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: Oh, so it's a manual step. Based on good scans, I tried to have a stack that could be run unatended, without manual intervention. MfG, JBG -- Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw at lug-owl.de +49-172-7608481 Signature of: The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty the second : decreases." (Thomas Jefferson)

On Wed, 2009-09-30 11:53:22 -0600, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: Btw, did anybody actually download the raw database? While surfing over the Manx page, I landed on [1], where Flo had a link to a DB dump [2], but that seems to be gone. (Or some kind of catch-all prevents it from being downloaded)... [1] http://hisdeedsaredust.com/category/manx/ [2] http://vt100.net/manx/dump/dec-all-20090403.tsv MfG, JBG -- Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw at lug-owl.de +49-172-7608481 Signature of: Ich hatte in letzter Zeit ein bi?chen viel Realitycheck. the second : Langsam m?chte ich mal wieder weitertr?umen k?nnen. -- Maximilian Wilhelm (18. Mai 2005, #lug-owl.de)

In article <20091003143112.GA10875 at lug-owl.de>, Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw at lug-owl.de> writes: I suggest that we begin discussions of recreating manx on a server somewhere, perhaps on Jay's server space he has kindly offered? Let's make an open source project (github?) for the software that drives the database so that we can add decentralized editing. I think one thing that held Paul back was that all edits had to go through him and were done manually. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>