[Coco] Help me digitize Color Computer Magazines

[tim lindner]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 1:07 PM, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:
> This is very cool and makes it very easy to contribute  I urge everyone
> reading this list to consider pitching in.
>
> A couple questions.
> First, I have noticed that sometimes the heading for the instructions
> for a task doesn't match the description of the task.
> "
> Check Ads
> Show all pages in issue
>
> Please double check the green boxed filler on this page. Fix any
> mistakes. There will be no green boxes if there ar no blocks of filler.
>
> Click "Submit Information" when finished. Click "Whole Page" if entire
> page is filler.
> "
>
> So which is it?  Am I supposed to box the ads or the filler?

I had some "check ad" type on a "check filler" task. It's fixed now.

> I'd also like to know more about the software you are using, and I
> suspect others on this list would be interested as well.  There is
> obviously some behind-the-scenes OCR going on.  Is this tesseract?

I chose tesseract (from Google code)  because it was the first I found
and if worked well. It doesn't like the article title font Dennis used
on the table of contents of the first two issues of Under Color. But
he switched to a Helvetica variant on the third issue.

I am not married to tesseract.

> GOCR?  Is this an existing software suite for collaboratively digitizing
> printed content, or something you've put together from existing
> components?

Its tesseract for OCR, ImageMagic for image manipulation and my own
Perl to bind it all together. Plus some JavaScript I wrote running in
the browser for the boxing.

> In any case, it's pretty cool, and looks like a good way to
> archive this material.

Thanks!

> Are there other CoCo-realated publications that
> we have permission to scan?

I think *The Color Computer Magazine* is also freely distributable,
But I don't have scans of thoes.

-- 
tim lindner
tlindner at macmess.org