[Coco] Pdf on coco3

[Aaron Wolfe]

It can be easy to forget the massive differences in scale between our
beloved coco and modern computers in some areas, especially when in
other areas it seems we haven't gained much ground.  But when you're
talking about "viewing a PDF", especially a scanned PDF of a magazine
like the Rainbow scans, you're talking about processing literally
hundreds or thousands of times more bytes than can fit in the address
space of the 6809 and then displaying it at a resolution and color
depth that is a fraction of the displays the PDF format targets.  I do
get the nostalgia/wow factor, but even an amazingly well executed
general purpose pdf viewer seems unlikely to be pleasant to use.

On the other hand, as Mathieu mentioned, there is a set of the Rainbow
and other coco magazines that contain ASCII text (OCRed).  Exporting
that to regular old text files would provide a way to read and search
the articles on a Coco using existing, mature tools.
I think it was Tim Lindner that had a really cool community project to
do OCR plus human checking on Rainbow articles.  The results of that
project might be usable on a Coco as well.  I'm sorry I can't find the
link, not sure if they are available.

Modern PDF processing just comes down to a relatively massive amount
of work for the coco, but there are still some really interesting
modern sources of information that the coco could process very well.
A lot of web services offer JSON or similar based APIs that would be
easy to process on the coco even in a higher level language like
BASIC09.  News and discussion sites like Reddit are primarily text
based, I could imagine a very functional reddit client actually.
There is also the whole Internet of Things world where everything is
sending small amounts of data at relatively slow speeds.  An MQTT
client for the coco would open the door to all kinds of interesting
things that fit nicely into the coco's capabilities.

$0.02
-Aaron



On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 11:26 AM, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:
>
>
> Sorry... but actually, scanned pdf files such as those of the Rainbow magazine are a special case, they're just sets of full-page JPEG files plus page numbering (some scanned pdfs also contain the ASCII version using optical recognition, but that's invisible until you select some text). A viewer for just the images could limit itself to displaying the JPEG files that are in a PDF container. The issues with displaying those files are pretty different from those with displaying vector graphics and fonts, though in the end it's all about pixel sizes, aliasing and stuff.
>
> The easiest solution for you could be to auto-export each page of a magazine to JPEG format and try to read that on the Coco, if there is a JPEG viewer. But quantizing it and encoding as GIF might be more efficient for Coco.
>

(snip)