How can I contribute?

[T_hairy_bootson]

Originally Posted by oneshotdead

but there should be alternatives for Amigans who don't want pretty pics, but just raw info.

No ones stopping you from doing it, the team already said they are not interested in doing it. So its time for you to either step up or leave it be.

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by oneshotdead

If someone would OCR these reviews and previews, starting with the most famous, critically acclaimed games, I would happily proof read them, it would be a joy.

Why don't you start the ball rolling then, save the magazine pages from these critically acclaimed games of yours and run them through your OCR software. It's easy to sit back and ask others to do it without even attempting a single page yourself. I'm sure you'll find it is a lot harder and more time consuming than you think.

I await your text files with baited breath!

[oneshotdead]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

I await your text files with baited breath!

Really? You come across more as the picture-book type.

[bLAZER]

To just OCR a page and proofreading it doesn't take that long, but the question is what you gonna do with the resulting text? It's not going to be anything readable. The layout in magazines with images scattering everywhere and etc. makes it impossible to just OCR the page and get a textfile with all the text in "readable" order. The only reason I can see is that you could include the textfile for searching, but reading - no way.

[idrougge]

Not to mention that 90s magazine design, the kind with blue text on green backgrounds, white Helvetica on top of a pixelated screenshot or red text on top of a plasma fractal, is difficult enough for the human reader, let alone a computer program, to discern.

[oneshotdead]

Thanks for the comments, guys. I myself have excellent eyesight, and to be honest I find reading plain RTF or TXT quite easy in programs like Context (a kind of Notepad variant), on my LCD monitor.

It would be possible to effectively format the columns in such filetypes, poviding one used a fixedwidth font and the same number of characters per line, or thereabouts. I've read whole textbooks this way. Hehehe, who needs PDF or LIT for books?

Of course, the pics would have to be ommitted, but that is no big deal, not to me, and not to most Amigans.

Currently, to view pagescans, I use XnView, which is an excellent program for zooming in to and dragging about the scan, but I have noticed many scans are blurry (and not even aligned straight), and although my eyesight is good, I can't read them for long with such annoyances.

The main advantage of OCR'ing is, as I said, searching, cross-referencing, and their minimal size, which means they can easily be deciminated throughout the Amiga community.

Lemon Amiga is a site I avoid, and Amiga Game Database I love for reviews. Why? One is bloated with graphics and other fluff, along with shallow comments by people who know nothing, and the other is written by experts and amateurs and is presented in plain HTML, which each review in TXT. Although the reviews aren't anything amazing, they are fun and easy to read, and I have learnt more from that site than that lemon.

[idrougge]

If it's easy, why don't you do it, Oneshot?

[alkis21]

E-mail sent, Galaxy.

[oneshotdead]

[idrougge=quote]
If it's easy, why don't you do it, Oneshot?[/quote]

Sadly, all my magazines were incinerated in a fit of rage as a teenager, but even if I had them, I don't have a scanner or OCR software.

But anyway, if someone could OCR a few interesting reviews, and upload them somewhere, I would happily download them and proofread and format them, just to see how viable it is. But if no one's interested at all (I think only P-J has expressed any kind of sentiment in favour of this idea), I will drop the idea.

[Codetapper]

OneShotDead: Either get yourself some OCR software or simply type up the reviews yourself from the page scans on the AMR site, or shove a cork in it.

We don't need you to explain how great your eyesight is, what software you use or the advantages of text over pictures - we are not complete morons you know. All you have done is give excuses so far.

[oneshotdead]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

OneShotDead: Either get yourself some OCR software or simply type up the reviews yourself from the page scans on the AMR site, or shove a cork in it.

lol, as if I'm going to download your bloated, blurry, skewed JPEGs, or whatever, wasting my crappy dial-up bandwidth, when someone might like my idea (doubtful at this point) and OCR something and upload it as a TXT for me to proofread and edit. If you deem my ideas infeasible, there are less rude ways to express it ("shove a cork in it", yawn). How infantile.

Originally Posted by Codetapper

We don't need you to explain how great your eyesight is, what software you use or the advantages of text over pictures - we are not complete morons you know. All you have done is give excuses so far.

This response is also infantile.

I think you should stick with coding, if that's indeed what you do, and leave community communication to the literati, since not only do you lack both tact and wit, but also comprehension skills.

I see little practical purpose in your idea, you see none in my idea. I suppose we should just leave it at that, shrug.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by oneshotdead

This response is also infantile.

I think you should stick with coding, if that's indeed what you do, and leave community communication to the literati, since not only do you lack both tact and wit, but also comprehension skills.

I think it's neither tactful nor mature to whine about how people who do you a service for free do it in the wrong way instead of following your slightest whim, especially when you yourself seem more prepared to whine in forums than invest a single minute or penny on your own great idea.

If you want something done, do it. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

[Codetapper]

oneshotdead: You finished your trolling-on-dialup session?

[Calgor]

@oneshotdead

If you did want to try your hand at OCR and see what results you may get, the following link with an evaluation version may let you know what is possible. It offers batch OCR (which as suggested earlier is probably the only remotely feasible method - though a custom shell script might turn a non-batch into a batch OCR program) and claims to be able to do 60+ languages. It also notes that colour OCR is much more dependent on input image quality.

http://www.cvisiontech.com/wordpress/?cat=12

[DrBong]

@Codetapper, idrougge

Stop feeding the animals!

[alkis21]

More out of curiosity than anything else, I did put the OCR theory to test while I was scanning a magazine yesterday. A review of Unreal had purple letters over a gray image background. The result was nowhere near accurate. I used Fine Reader.

[alkis21]

I'd like to report an error. This review is referring to the 1MB Extended version of Kick Off 2, not plain Kick Off 2.
I also wonder why this version is not in HOL!

[Codetapper]

Does anyone have this version? I can certainly break the link to HOL, but I think it's better to mark the review as "to be checked" with a note so it still at least comes up when you search Kick Off 2. (Until the 1Mb version is found that is)

[alkis21]

Yup

***post edited by DamienD***

alkis21: please don't link to .IPF files on EAB.

[idrougge]

So, does anyone have some scanning tips? How do you best scan a magazine without destroying it? What are good settings regarding resolution and descreening? How do you automatise and speed up the process?