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Re: Nibbles Magazines ISO
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In article <Pine.GSO.3.95.iB1.0.1050923111242.10123B-100000@halifax.chebucto.ns.ca>,
Simon D. Williams <bb065@chebucto.ns.ca> wrote:
>> I have a question for anyone that has the DVD/CD - are the PDF's searchable?
>
>I sent an email to Nibble regarding this and got no reply, though I did
>get a few spammy emails from them, which didn't address the issue at all.
>
>Like most people I'm quite interested in the DVD, but it is a _major_
>investment. Being able to search the text of the PDFs would definitely be
>a deciding factor...
If they're just a bunch of bitmaps (which would be the case if they were
scanned but not OCR'd), they won't be searchable.
Just scanning each issue is a big-enough task. Running the scans through
OCR is probably at least a couple orders of magnitude more work. I've tried
a couple of times with my Nibble collection, and have never even gotten
through a complete issue before getting distracted by some other task. Even
with the best OCR software, you're going to need to proofread the output.
This is especially crucial for program listings.
The checksums provided with the listings help out here, but there were two
methods used by Nibble. The earlier method was Key Perfect, which used a
program they sold for checking your input. They switched to CheckIt
in later years (around 1986 or '87) for which a free line-by-line checker
was published in every issue. I extended that checker to make listings for
code entered by another method, so I have a way to check later issues. I
never bought Key Perfect back in the day, though, and I don't know if it's
available anywhere.
(It looks like some of the program disks that were available are up for free
download now, which would save some OCR work from March 1988 to February
1992. Go check out the April 1990 issue. I had one of my programs
published in it. :-) )
_/_
/ v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( http://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
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