Compute magazine (retry)

[Scott Stevens]

On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 10:44:16 +0200
Holger Veit <holger.veit at ais.fraunhofer.de> wrote:

> Somewhere my last posting didn't find its way to the list, although 
> there were some downloads of the files below.
> Retry (with few typo corrections)::
> 
> Hi,
> for quite some time I have some magazines of COMPUTE ("Club Of 
> Microprocessor Programmers, Users and Technical Experts"), a newsletter  
> sponsored by National Semiconductor, lying around which I consider 
> worthwhile to be conserved for the past. The date I am talking about is 
> around 1975..1977.
> 
> Some questions:
> 1. I have only some issues, namely V2N7...V2N12, V3N4...V3N7. Does 
> anyone have other issues (and is willing to scan or copy those)? I'd be  
> very interested in this epoch.
> 
> 2. Scanning: You find a sample issue at 
> http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/~veit/v2n7.pdf (2MB). This was scanned B&W 
> 400dpi, stored as TIF and  converted with Acrobat. My problem is that 
> even with this some listing pages are barely readable, see page 5 for 
> example. This is probably because  of lack of contrast; the magazine is 
> printed on light brown paper with dark brown text; other issues use blue 
> or green text color which is probably even less readable in a scan. If 
> one scans in color with 600dpi (as in sample  
> http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/~veit/3x.pdf, 2MB) this will result in much 
> larger files - the raw TIF is 95MB on my disk, which is not a diskspace 
> issue for me, but for downloaders; expect a single issue to be 40MB and 
> more in size.
> Do the "professional scanners" here, like Al, have a recommendation for 
> resolving this?
> 

I am far from 'professional' but I always scan with grayscale and then use a good image editor (I like Micrographx Picture Publisher) that has filters to establish a threshold.  That way I have a static image to work with.  When it's done it gets saved (for distribution) as one-bit and I often archive the original grayscale scans, which are too big to distribute.  The big chunk eraser tool is good for cleaning up the stray pixels once it's a one-bit image.