[Coco] Recent changes to the CoCoMag Website

[tim lindner]

(Quickly: I run the CoCoMag website
<http://cocomag.dyndns.org/UnderColor.shtml>. It is a distributed
magazine digitization project. Where volunteers turn Color Computer
Magazines scans into searchable text. Tasks are easy and quick. Make it
you default web page! A task-a-day is all I ask.)

There are some lingering issues I'd like to bring up with the community.
The final product of this project discards some textual information.
Like bold, italics and other formatting. Also hyphenation between green
boxes are difficult to correct. Correctly formatting listings is
difficult. Figures, illustrations, and photos are completely eliminated.

I have always considered having the orginal scans near the final product
to be a solution to these problems, but have come to the conclusion it
is not.

I've discussed this with Allen Huffman and he has agreed to allow me to
push each issue into the coco25.com wiki
<http://www.coco25.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page> when completed.

The MediaWiki software has really good editing and mark-up tools to
allow the correction of all of the above deficiencies.

Comments?

Also, here are some recent and not-so-recent changes to the software:

* Pane slider when checking OCR text or listings.

When you are checking text or listing OCR, you'll see a grey bar
splitting the two sections. If you have Javascript turned on you can
drag this bar left or right to change the size of the edit text form
field.

* Attach a name to the tasks you complete.

Click the link on the main page to "Register" with the project. Here you
can enter in a handle that will be associated with each completed task.
There is a leader board on the main page which lists three days of
completed tasks.

* Image reprocessing

In the "Report a problem" form, there is a new link to reprocess an
image. There you can change the rotation, blur and denoise settings.
I've had some problems with browser image cacheing. So you may have to
refresh the web page to see the reprocessed image.

-- 
tim lindner
tlindner at macmess.org                                              Bright