Anyone interested in a searchable commodore magazine index?

[Impakt]

Hi all,
Between jobs at the moment and tinkering with bits and pieces to keep my skills up to date. One project I was working on was indexing various commodore magazines (PDF with text included) so they can be searchable. Not sure if something already exists.



The magazines i have indexed currently are (~160,000 pages and counting):

C64: 
 
Ahoy 1.1 
Commodore Format Complete 
Commodore Free 
Commodore Horizons 100% 
Commodore Magazine 100% (All 34 Issues) 
Commodore Microcomputers - partial 
Commodore Power-Play 100% 
Commodore World 
CommodoreUser 
Compute (Issues 001-040) 
Compute (Issues 041-080) 
Compute (Issues 081-120) 
Compute!'s Gazette 
Info 100% (All 49 Issues plus Cyborg Gazette) 
Run 100% (All 94 Issues plus 5 Special Issues) 
The Transactor 
Your64 
YourCommodore 
ZZap 64 plus Commodore Force 
Zzap!64 
 
Amiga: 
Amiga History Complete 
AmigaComputing 
AmigaFormat 
AmigaShopper 
AmigaWorld 
CUAmiga 
ST_AmigaFormat

It's still a work in progress so the UI isn't there yet but you can test it for hits here


Change the search term in the URL as you see fit to see how it goes!



Impakt

[Radertified]

The only other resource that I can think of is AMR but that isn't auto generated, and due to that is not complete. This could be extremely handy. Thanks Impakt!

[dreadnought]

Searchable text for old mags would be one of the wonders of the retro world. I think you can do something like that on some mags on archive.org, not sure in what capacity though.

In any case, all the best. I'm a great fan of retro magazines and would definitely welcome such tool, or better yet, a downloadable database.

[Foebane]

Amiga Magazine Rack is good enough for me, thanks.

[kamelito]

This is awesome. Thanks
How about adding technical mags too?
https://commodore.bombjack.org/amiga...-magazines.htm

[dreamkatcha]

Many old mags have already been given the searchable text treatment and so can be found via Google (usually you end up at archive.org), but there are lots that have slipped through the cracks, making research really difficult. I'd say it's definitely worthwhile if you could search for a phrase and be sure you've covered all the bases. You don't know what you don't know, if you know what I mean.

Also, some of the PDF text conversions that are already out there are absolutely useless. Try copying and pasting a paragraph of text and reading the gibberish that results! In these cases, I've captured pages as an image and used services like onlineocr.net to quickly extract the text. Only useful on a very small scale obviously.

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by Impakt

One project I was working on was indexing various commodore magazines (PDF with text included) so they can be searchable. Not sure if something already exists.

The magazines i have indexed currently are (~160,000 pages and counting):

<snipped>

It's still a work in progress so the UI isn't there yet but you can test it for hits here

As others have said, the Amiga Mag Rack (AMR) is the only real viable searchable source for Amiga/C= mags....but is quite incomplete, largely due to the lack of time/resources of the small AMR team and virtually zero support from people outside the AMR team to catalogue reviews, previews, cheats etc. for individual issues of mags from that time period. People are far more keen on scanning mags than they are cataloguing them - go figure!

Your work looks very encouraging, though! Obviously, a clean UI will be essential to make the best use of it....not to mention the addition of as many retro mag indices as possible. Keep pushing ahead with it and let us know when you have a nice, clean UI to perform searches!

[Angus]

Don't know if it helps, but a few years back, me and some buddies made some text lists for a number of magazines. I think we called it AIM (Amiga Index of Magazines). We put all the reviews and features of each issue into a text document for each mag, so you could do a simple search. If the info will help I'll provide the text files.

As we used to say at the time, "Hey, we've all got issues, right?".

[dreamkatcha]

On a sort of related note have you seen Crash Online? It achieves what you're aiming for, while repurposing the content to make it easier to read on modern devices. It's a fantastic resource for those of us who appreciate the text more than snazzy layouts, albeit doesn't prod those nostalgia buttons in the same way a PDF scan would.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by dreamkatcha

It's a fantastic resource for those of us who appreciate the text more than snazzy layouts, albeit doesn't prod those nostalgia buttons in the same way a PDF scan would.

Have you used OCR to rip the plain text from the printed articles? Would be the most efficient way of storing the most articles in the least amount of space.

[dreamkatcha]

I've done that in the past just to use small extracts/quotes in articles. I don't think I'd bother just for my own personal reading convenience though.

There's no real need where Amiga game reviews are concerned in any case because this superb site exists. I love that. All the various reviews for game x on a single page in an easy to digest format.

Sometimes the old mag layouts were a bit too scattergun for their own good. Your eyes are drawn all over the place before you've finished reading the current paragraph so it all feels a bit disjointed. Nowadays zoomed in on a phone it's not always apparent where columns continue when they reach the end of a page. I know, first world problems and all that, but Amiga Reviews neatly sidesteps that issue, so why not?

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by dreamkatcha

On a sort of related note have you seen Crash Online? It achieves what you're aiming for, while repurposing the content to make it easier to read on modern devices. It's a fantastic resource for those of us who appreciate the text more than snazzy layouts, albeit doesn't prod those nostalgia buttons in the same way a PDF scan would.

Originally Posted by Foebane

Have you used OCR to rip the plain text from the printed articles? Would be the most efficient way of storing the most articles in the least amount of space.

Originally Posted by dreamkatcha

There's no real need where Amiga game reviews are concerned in any case because this superb site exists. I love that. All the various reviews for game x on a single page in an easy to digest format.

You beat me to the punch! I was going to link to Tim Janssen's Amiga Reviews website. It's a fantastic idea in concept, but I'm guessing very labour-intensive in practice....which is perhaps why the site wasn't updated for a good 10 years prior to the last couple. Tim was an active AMR member in its early days (and a nice bloke to boot!), but I gather real life stalled progress on his own mag website and, naturally, his contributions to AMR also.

Anyway, I've been a big fan of Tim's website from way back....so it's great to see that he's managed to get it going again over the last couple of years! It's a massive undertaking, though, to construct handmade-type websites for retro mag game reviews when it goes beyond a single magazine. Doing it for a single mag is obviously massive enough - you just have to look at Crash Online and other sites like the Your Spectrum Unofficial Archive, SUMO and the old Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years website (much loved & missed - RIP! ).

Originally Posted by Angus

Don't know if it helps, but a few years back, me and some buddies made some text lists for a number of magazines. I think we called it AIM (Amiga Index of Magazines). We put all the reviews and features of each issue into a text document for each mag, so you could do a simple search. If the info will help I'll provide the text files.

Angus, Angus, Angus! Whatever happened to the much too short-lived AIM project and that Norwegian Amigan co-conspirator of yours Señor Froholt?! Even a young whippersnapper by the name of Adrian Simpson was involved in the project!

You probably won't believe it, but I still have all the AIM mag indices saved in PDF/text format in my Amiga research/resource folder on HD....along with some very handy ones, especially for the North American mags, from the YoungMonkey website too!

http://www.youngmonkey.ca/nose/magazines/index.html

As we used to say at the time, "Hey, we've all got issues, right?".

Haha! I guess I have several hundred (and counting) more than most then!!!

[dreamkatcha]

Yes, definitely, re: your labour intensive comment. With some OCR software/web sites you'd have to feed them a column at a time because they can easily get confused, especially with some of the more arty layouts. Then to make a proper job of it, a human has to read over the output and make corrections that only a human possibly could. I get the impression Tim did that because I spotted very few mistakes in his extracted content. You can tell straightaway when someone has OCRed a page and then just dumped the result onto a blog or whatever.

Tim has saved my sanity on a few occasions at work. You know when you're at screaming point plugging away against office politics and corporate cobblers and just need to check out for a while to stop you throwing something through the window? Well, my antidote is to copy the text from some pages of AR and paste them into an email minus the formatting, then regress back to the nineties studying the articles as though I'm neck-deep in some major work project. Shhh, don't tell the boss. It's safer than drugs and whisky I suppose. ;D

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by dreamkatcha

It's safer than drugs and whisky I suppose. ;D

But not as fun

[dreamkatcha]

I tried it the other way, but the Powers that Be deemed snorting coke off a bottle of JD to be... how did HR put it in my performance review report? "Not conducive to the efficiency of his workflow". That's it. Killjoys. :|

[Angus]

Never did Maradona any harm!

....oh, wait.

[dreamkatcha]

To be fair, there's no way of knowing if it was a combination of booze and cocaine that brought about his untimely demise, or if he was finally struck down by lightning for impersonating God.