marktrade's work in progress

[marktrade]

GMR 02 Mar 2003

The cover and some of the pages were badly damaged, so I spent quite a bit of time restoring them. Some of the damage is still there but I think I got most or all of what any casual reader would notice.

[RetroDefense]

Absolutely amazed by the amount of scan work you've been putting in, marktrade - thank you!

[KiwiArcader]

Issue 65 of Play is now available over at OGM if you haven't got a copy of that issue marktrade. That's two issues out in the wild now :-)

Unfortunately I don't have any more of these. It was unfortunately just a one off that came in a box lot of mags a while ago.

[marktrade]

Issue 65 of Play is now available over at OGM if you haven't got a copy of that issue marktrade. That's two issues out in the wild now :-)

Unfortunately I don't have any more of these. It was unfortunately just a one off that came in a box lot of mags a while ago.

Hey that's great! But I'm not able to connect to OGM. I haven't been able to for a couple days now. It says my IP address is blocked. I figured you were still doing maintenance or restructuring.

Here's my latest scan, another one that had a lot of damage but I took care of it.

GMR 03 Apr 2003

There was an awkward "perfume style" fold-out ad for Everquest in this issue. It wasn't scented but a fraction of the page folded out in a similar manner. I wasn't sure how to handle this at first, but it wasn't included in the page numbering anyway, so I just squeezed it in at the end. It wasn't like a poster or insert that I could just discard. It was printed like any other double-page ad.

I thought these GMRs would be the death of me, but I think I'm doing okay.

[KiwiArcader]

WTF to that?

PM me your current IP address mate as I am not blocking anything other than 2 IP addresses used by people spamming the site and they are only blacklisted to stop comments so it's a total mystery why you can't access the site. Very weird...

[samuraip]

I can't log on to OGM either - when I click the login icon the last few days, I get 'This Page Isn't Redirecting Properly'.

[marktrade]

GMR 08 Sep 2003

[marktrade]

I just remembered that is a variant cover than what's currently in the gallery on Retromags. I have several other issues with variant covers as well and have been wondering how to handle them.

Maybe add variant covers to the CBR as extra pages at the end so they don't interfere with the page numbering (GMR counts the cover as page one).

[KiwiArcader]

Probably is the best way of handling that ....

[marktrade]

Probably is the best way of handling that ....

In that case I'll need help in determining which scan of the alternate cover is preferred to include in the file (I do not have access to the other covers to scan them on my own).

Right now I'm indexing the rest of my collection in order to determine what I have or don't have at a glance, just to make sure. Alternate covers are a pain, huh?

[marktrade]

Next Generation magazine issue 23 November 1996.

https://archive.org/details/NextGeneration23Nov1996

What's so special about Next Generation issue 23? It was the first issue to come with a disc! Filled with QuickTime movies of gameplay videos, previews, and game demos all packaged in a multimedia presentation. And you can find it here!

https://archive.org/details/NextGeneration23Nov1996Disc

Future discs contained features and interviews with members of the game industry. I have almost all of the discs and will be uploading them as well.

Haha, ooookay I kinda screwed up on this one. It's missing about 160 pages. Yeah.

I don't know what happened! I think I was experimenting with making two files but by then it was late and I was very tired and forgot, maybe?

Anyways here is "Part 2" with the same nice high resolution at 2800 px tall:

https://archive.org/details/NextGeneration23Nov1996P2

And just for good measure here is the entire magazine in one file at 2400 px tall:

https://archive.org/details/NextGeneration23Nov1996_2400

I apologize for the oversight.

[marktrade]

These past few days I've been scanning and digitizing about a hundred Mac CDs I won in auction for cheap. A significant portion are magazine discs from Macworld, MacFormat, and Mac Home Journal from the late 90s. If anyone's interested you'll be able to see them on Macintosh Garden and/or archive.org in time or by request. Work has been busy and lately I've just been coming home and resting.

Before I get back to scanning mags, here's that CD from CGW 140, which hadn't been available on archive.org yet. There's a neat flight-sim-themed multimedia presentation with some (I think) cool music and an intro from the editor. Also supposedly Richard Nixon is "haunting" the disc, but I can't find him. I only heard of him by listening to the raw WAV files. If you find him, let me know.

https://archive.org/details/CGWXMAR

[marktrade]

PC Accelerator 06 Feb 1999

I don't know why this issue of PC Accelerator was titled "PC Action" on the cover. I guess it was some special issue? It's just another issue of PC Accelerator. Except it's printed on good paper and came with two discs! Which you can download here:

https://archive.org/details/PCXL0299D1

[Areala]

Ah, Rynn...you were poised, with your red hair and dragon-taming abilities, to dethrone Lara Croft as my digital lover.

What happened to you, sweetie? You jumped ship to PS2 and then disappeared for all time. I thought we had something. *sigh* 'Twas not meant to be, I suppose...

*huggles*
Areala

[marktrade]

Oof, it's been a while. Here's another 300-page behemoth.

Next Generation 24 Dec 1996

With disc.

Edit: Kiwi noticed the DPI settings were a little out of whack, so I re-uploaded it so they all matched 300 DPI.

[marktrade]

I have scanned quite a lot of issues but have not edited or uploaded them yet. I find the scanner works better when it's getting a lot action with different paper types. Older magazines usually have tougher stock and do a pretty good job wiping away debris the cheaper/glossier stuff leaves behind. If I scan a lot at once, I can do a lot less rescanning and editing away dirt lines. At least that's how it seems. This scanner was built to scan all day so maybe that's how it should be used. Kinda like how cars are made for highway driving and aren't really made for stop and go.

I've been thinking about putting out a call for editors. I usually edit in 600 DPI so that when future technology allows it I can just resize the images and release them. I know the conventional wisdom is that 300 DPI is enough but I don't agree. On some magazines the text is printed at 2400 DPI and ABBY FineReader (the automatic OCR app for archive.org) has been known to work better with 600 DPI scans.

But if demand allows it then I can upload some smaller more manageable images that others can edit. Would anyone be interested?

I personally don't see much reason to edit. Since I read mostly on a desktop computer and not on a pad, I'm less annoyed by misalignments or margins. The editing is tiring me out a bit much.

So what do you say? We could get a lot more work done with the help of an editor or two.

[KiwiArcader]

That's why I setup profiles for my scanner about 1mm in from the edges of the page. Less editing on my part means throwing a magazine out a lot faster.

People generally just want to read the mags and in my books as long as they have been scanned at 300dpi and are readable you don't get any complaints. I have profiles for all the magazines I am scanning so it's easy to swap from one to the other and not have to bother doing any cropping etc. Jason has profiles for his mags so it saves me having to do anything much with his work. Others like Dan submit raw scans and a LOT of editing is required. That's why they take longer for me to get them online.

If I were you I'd take time to create profiles for the magazines you are scanning, especially if you have lots of them, and just put them out there. The quality of your scans are high anyway. If someone wants to take your scans and edit and resubmit them somewhere that's great but the chances of that occurring are low IMHO

[marktrade]

I do have profiles but they are not very useful. Perhaps my scanner is faulty? Not only can I not count on all the pages going in straight, the scanning area for the backside scanner is slightly out of the alignment with the frontside scanner (not a lot, but just enough to create a thin margin).

There are some retromags scans that are not edited for alignment or margins. Next Generation #51 is a good example. If I could upload scans like that I'd have a hundred done by now.

[RetroDefense]

I may not be entirely qualified to chime in as I don't own an "industrial strength" scanner, but imo, if your time is better spent scanning instead of editing, just scan.

You have to remember, for those of us with slower, mundane scanners, we have the time during scans to perform edits, so why not? But given the scanning horsepower at your disposal, I don't think the usual should apply. If you have the capacity to scan/upload even three or four unedited issues for every one edited issue, it's to the benefit of Preservation for you to spend your time scanning instead of editing.

Personally, I prefer aligned pages only because I read most digital mags via tablet anymore and mis-alignments are noticeable. But it's not a deal breaker. As KiwiArcader mentioned, as long as your scans are optimized for preservation in most other regards (DPI, etc), these type of edits can always be performed after the fact (i.e. after the initial upload).

Don't get me wrong - I greatly appreciate RetroMags' attention to detail in archiving quality scans. I've found mag scans via other sites where standards are almost non-existent, with scans blurry, misaligned to the point of lost content, etc. But when you compare RetroMags' current rate of preservation versus the backlog (which increases every time the cutoff date is adjusted), it's fair to say there is a very long, long way to go. And given physical mags exist in less and less numbers every day, I'm all for your "picking up the pace" and letting alignment/margin edits become secondary if it means more preserved content.

'Course, the final decision is up to RetroMags as to what scans they want to host. A compromise may be an "edit queue" of sorts, where your scans can be made available to editors before they're officially posted to the site. Essentially, that "call for editors" you mentioned - let others in the community step up and assist in editing scans to "RetroMag Certified" standards, so to speak.

[marktrade]

I completely agree and thank you for chiming in, RetroDefense.

Although I'll still edit together some "nice" uploads of particular issues, I think I should focus on scanning first and worry about making things look nice later. So, starting today, I'll upload large volumes of unedited scans for editors or for plain use.

Here are 15 issues of Next Generation, 28-34 and 49-56.

https://archive.org/details/ng_unedited

They are all 2800 pixels tall at 300 DPI. If anyone needs higher quality I can re-scan over twice that level of detail.

To Editors: There will be many pages with vertical lines. Most of the time I can just edit these out but sometimes they are bad enough to need rescanning. Some of these issues were very dirty so there will be more lines than usual. If the lines are so bad that they cannot be edited, just drop a message here in this thread that an issue needs to be rescanned and I'll do it.

I'll continue uploading more unedited issues of Next Generation to that link. I'll also create new links for other unedited magazine uploads, like GMR.

Even with dirt lines and bad margins, archive.org will automatically OCR them and give us a searchable database, which I think is kind of a big deal.

Also, as always, I welcome anyone else making their own scans. Nothing I upload is ever intended to be the final word on a magazine issue. So, criticism is welcome.

[RetroDefense]

I pulled down Next Generation 49, 53 and 56 - will give editing a go!

[marktrade]

Here are ten more issues of GMR.

https://archive.org/details/gmr_unedited

Also I added another issue of Next Generation here:

https://archive.org/details/ng_unedited

#47

I pulled down Next Generation 49, 53 and 56 - will give editing a go!

Be sure to stay in touch on what needs to be rescanned. I'll be much more likely to make sure it's a good scan if I know someone else is working on it! Otherwise I'll just upload the first scan to get at least something uploaded.

[KiwiArcader]

Issue 56 has already been edited and a PDF version is available over at my website.

[KiwiArcader]

Issue 10 of GMR has been edited and is available over at OGM ....

*** UPDATE *** Issue 51 of Next Generation is also available.

[marktrade]

Thanks, Kiwi!

I have something a little different, an issue of Famitsu Dreamcast from July 2001.

https://archive.org/details/FamDC07

3300 pixels tall unedited, I'm interested to see how good the OCR is on that, but my hunch is 600 DPI full res will be necessary to get the most of out it.

This is the only issue of Famitsu DC that I have but I do have plenty of issues of Weekly Famitsu. They're rather thick, stapled, and I have no idea what's an appropriate file size for those. My knowledge of Japanese is basically first grade level. A good OCR will help translate.