The ZX Spectrum Explored by Tim Hartnell

[hikoki]

Do you provide books? Do you upload pdf files? Please see these instructions
https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/artic ... ake-a-book
all need is to upload a zipped folder (which is actually a cbz file) and their system generates ocr, pdf, torrent, ebook, etc

For some books it may worth the effort to take existing PDFs and make CBZ files with Imagemagick or any other software, then let Archive.org make all the OCR and PDF generation process.

[PeterJ]

Seems like a lot of effort where PDFs exist, but if you want to do some I'm very happy to host them here for you.

[Bizzley]

For some books it may worth the effort to take existing PDFs and make CBZ files with Imagemagick or any other software, then let Archive.org make all the OCR and PDF generation process.

A couple of points.

Contributors have no control over the creation of PDFs on archive.org, the PDF derived by their software for the Scream Queen magazine link you gave above is barely 1.3MB and look absolutely awful.

Ripping images out of PDFs only works properly if the PDFs are simple bitmap wrapped files. A lot of PDF creation software use methods to reduce the final size of the file which causes results that aren't always obvious. Using the link above again if you rip the bitmaps out of it you'll find them a blobby mess, because archive.org uses Omnipage as the OCR engine and makes use of the image optimization features it has. It looks OK through a PDF viewer but awful when you've pulled the images out.

[PeterJ]

Good points [mention]Bizzley[/mention]

I did try downloading PDFs of Popular Computing Weekly and Home Computing Weekly some time back and the quality was indeed terrible.

https://archive.org/details/home-computing-weekly

https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly

[hikoki]

OK fellows. I'll try to upload some book later to see if there is some way to get decent results Maybe the pdf will be better if the images have a high DPI

[hikoki]

Done. I took this pdf book that Peter shared in this post viewtopic.php?f=6&t=564#p7787
opened it with PDF-XChange Viewer, went to file>export>export to image>save as png ; export mode:save each page to a separate single page image file ; resolution: 600 dpi
resulting in a 20 gb folder which takes up 670 mb after being zipped. Then I changed the extension from .zip to .cbz and uploaded to archive.org
the file is being processed at the moment https://archive.org/details/CrackingCodeZXSpectrum
the comic viewer, ocr powered search,pdf,epub should appear later.. let's see the quality of the automatic generated pdf.
I've read the images within the zip folder are converted to jpeg2000 format so that's why the pdf may be of poor quality. Anyway your cbz file remains in place to download and it seems possible to edit files according to this page, https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/artic ... ting-item-
so I could just add the original pdf file.
Most importantly you have a nice comic viewer and their pdf is small and good enough to read online.

[hikoki]

Another alternative could be to upload pdf books to openlibrary.org
For instance see these z80 assembler books, https://openlibrary.org/search?q=Z80+as ... ltext=true
You could just provide such "read" links which open pdf books with a nice reader.
For pdf books in the wos mirror that don't have OCR, you can add OCR with PDF-XChange Viewer which is free, o maybe it is not necessary as openlibrary.org may add OCR when you upload pdf files, I don't know.

[hikoki]

There you have the Internet Archive BookReader https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader
One can download the sources and just edit links within the javascript.
I think I'll stop here : ) thanks for your time

[hikoki]

The search function in the above book is ready! It took the text three days to get indexed, which was expected when reading the FAQ.
Search inside is not working for a book?
Books are not always indexed quickly and sometimes, due to factors such as size, cannot be indexed at all. Sometimes it is a bug and we would appreciate being notified.

Anyways forget the cbz comic hassle. Just upload the original pdf and that's it, all the files including the image viewer and OCR will be generated by the system. Don't forget to add OCR to the original file with pdf-xchange viewer so users can search after downloading it.
If you want the book to be listed on openlibrary.org, you'll have to create an entry in there and associate it with the book link in archive.org

[PROSM]

I've received the book. Right now, I'm starting to type in the programs for the archive. Once those are done, I'll begin to scan the book itself.

[Einar Saukas]

I've received the book. Right now, I'm starting to type in the programs for the archive. Once those are done, I'll begin to scan the book itself.

Thank you!!!

[PeterJ]

I've received the book. Right now, I'm starting to type in the programs for the archive. Once those are done, I'll begin to scan the book itself.

Glad it arrived OK.

[Hedge1970]

Off the back of this post I googled around a and found a copy of this book. Thanks for the awareness

[PeterJ]

Off the back of this post I googled around a and found a copy of this book. Thanks for the awareness

No problem

Yes, they come up on eBay regularly for around £8 - £10

[PROSM]

A week after having received the book, I'm about halfway through typing in the games chapter (the 2nd last and largest chapter of the book). The last chapter (on three-dimensional graphics) only contains a very short type-in, so it should be the quickest one to finish. Once the type-ins are complete, I will turn my attention to scanning in the book.

Interestingly, there's a foreword by Sir Clive himself, which reads:

A sheet of paper may carry the jottings of an idiot or a sonnet by Shakespeare, but by itself it is nothing. In the same way a computer, however powerful it may be, is only what the programmer makes it, and therefore the skill and art of programming has risen to great importance. Hence this book, which takes over where the manual provided with the Spectrum leaves off. No manual can say it all and ours can only give the basics of programming. This book, by means of program examples, teaches skills of programming which, without its aid, might take years to acquire. It will be of great benefit both to the reader who has recently taken up programming and to the more experienced programmer who wishes to increase his skills.

Clive Sinclair

[PROSM]

Right, finally got around to finishing off the type-ins. I had a long break of about a month when I came across the listing for Jack-man - it was just this huge monstrous block of PRINT statements for the first two pages!

Anyway, here's a link for the download:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/za8blh5m5ati0 ... s.zip?dl=0

I've provided a TAP image of each listing labelled in the contents section of the book, and also screenshots for each of them (except the ones that don't display anything) so that they can be rapidly sorted for preservation in ZXDB. I've tried my best to get everything formatted exactly as it is in the book, but I've probably made one or two little slips here and there (believe it or not, reading from listings produced on a ZX Printer is not easy ), so I might release revised tape images if I find mistakes.

Now to actually scan the book itself.

[hikoki]

Thanks
Let us know how you end up scanning the book.

As an experiment, I uploaded this pdf book to archive.org
https://archive.org/download/CrackingTh ... ZXSpectrum
I recommend the freeware program pdf-xchange viewer to add OCR to the original pdf file before uploading it.
Archive.org will generate ocr (besides other files like a jpg zipped folder) automatically though the ocr is just available when reading online, so it is best that you add ocr to the original file which can be downloadd as you can see on the links above.

[R-Tape]

Right, finally got around to finishing off the type-ins. I had a long break of about a month when I came across the listing for Jack-man - it was just this huge monstrous block of PRINT statements for the first two pages!

Amazing dedication! Cheers PROSM. Ta for providing them in such a clear way. I probably won't get manage to them collated in time for the upcoming update, but if not it will be the following one.

EDIT - how do we think these should be presented?

-A different ZXDB ID for every type in, and linked as a group?
-or all under 1 ID, under the title "ZX-Spectrum Explored"?