Scanning Resolution of Traveller CDROMs ?

[Thunderbolt]

Does anybody know what resolution the Traveller CDROMs were scanned at. If I view them at '100%' they seem to be something of the order of 1024 pixels high, although anti-aliasing might be fooling me as to what their natural size really is.

Perhaps somebody has dissected them with full fat Adobe Acrobat to get some of these details?

 

[ShapeShifter]

Does anybody know what resolution the Traveller CDROMs were scanned at. If I view them at '100%' they seem to be something of the order of 1024 pixels high, although anti-aliasing might be fooling me as to what their natural size really is.

Perhaps somebody has dissected them with full fat Adobe Acrobat to get some of these details?

I just got the CD a few days ago and I'm going through the titles looking them over for missing pages, scan quality, etc. So far I've seen that p. 8 is upside-down in the Traveller Starter Edition, and some scans are done at such lo-res that it's EXTREMELY hard to read them, whereas other scans are pretty well-done. Odd, really. I cannot understand the variable scan qualities, except that 2+ people were given the task of scanning and at least 1 person had NO experience with scanning equipment. I'll keep a log of my findings.

 

[chshrkt]

You might find this thread useful for consolidating data. I would be interested to see the comparison of issues on your CDRom versus mine.

 

[Thunderbolt]

Having scanned in a bunch of FASA magazines and supplements this week, I wonder if it was automated to a certain extent, perhaps with a sheet feeder or something, because doing it by hand is sheer torture.

You can imagine a sheet getting shuffled upside down and then the guy comes back when the job is done, none the wiser.

 

[Gadrin]

I just got the CD a few days ago and I'm going through the titles looking them over for missing pages, scan quality, etc. So far I've seen that p. 8 is upside-down in the Traveller Starter Edition, and some scans are done at such lo-res that it's EXTREMELY hard to read them, whereas other scans are pretty well-done. Odd, really. I cannot understand the variable scan qualities, except that 2+ people were given the task of scanning and at least 1 person had NO experience with scanning equipment. I'll keep a log of my findings.

Page 5 is missing from the Exotic Atmospheres pdf. I was lucky and got someone to send me a PNG of that page. I keep it in the same folder on my hard disk.

There are many pdfs with scrambled text (it looks fine on screen) but if you search or extract the text (I have tools that do so) it comes out as garbage. I was searching for a world in Spinward Marches S3 (not the SM Campaign) and couldn't find it. Found it by hand and did a text-select and copy/paste to the clipboard and into Notepad and got garbage.

At least two pdfs are badly blurred (Safari Ship & ??) I just saw it this week, I've looked at so many, I don't recall off-hand which one it is. There could be more.

Some of them also have "scrunched" fonts where portions are readable but not clear. I haven't looked at the OCR on those yet.

There are a few with pages upside down.

My copy of the Traveller Book has several of the graphics colored with RED, I'm not sure if that was like that originally.

RELATED But NOT ON THE CT-CD are the T4 pdfs I bought from RPG-Now.
They look okay on screen but are hard to read in printed form unless I use B&W + BEST as the printing format.

Usually I use "draft" mode on printouts to keep up the speed and save ink.

So just keep that in mind.

>

 

[ShapeShifter]

Thanks for the heads-up about p. 5. Mine's absent too. Page 4 ends with

"Carbon dioxide atmospheres have the property of trapping heat, causing a pro-"

and page 6 starts with

"odorless, colorless gas which could easily
pass unnoticed until it is too late."


Now all I have to do is figure out what a pro-odorless gas is!

 

[ShapeShifter]

CT CD-ROM QUALITY CHECK

These are all I've been able to check so far:

Supplements

S01-S10 look alright.

My disk is defective and so I can't yet check S11-13.

We all know that Special Supplement 2 is missing p. 5

Adventures

A00 Imp. Fringe.........good, exc. for map.
A00 Imp. Fringe Map....good.
A01......good
A02......POOR SCAN (needs to be redone).
A03-A09......good
A10......POOR SCAN. p. 15 map upside-down. p. 25 upside-down
A11.....POOR SCAN.
A12-13......good

B00 Understand. Trav.....good
B00 Trav. Book............good
B00 Trav. Adv.............good
B00 Starter Trav..........POOR SCAN. p. 8 upside-down.
B00 Intro to Trav.........VERY POOR SCAN. p. 10 upside-down.
B01-B05.................good
B06 Scouts............POOR SCAN. double p. 30; no p. 31; p. 52 upside-down.
B07 Merch. Pr............p. 4 pic upside-down.
B08 Robots..............POOR SCAN

SS1, SS3.............good

Double Adventures

D01 Shadows.................POOR SCAN
D01 Annic Nova..............good
D02 Mission/Mithril..........p. 6 missing
D02-D05.......................good
D06 Night/Conquest.......p. 13 upside-down
D06 Divine Intervention.....good

Alien Modules

AM1-2...................good
AM3 Vargr.............p. 20 twice; 28 missing
AM4 Zhodani............23 & 24 twice; 42 missing
AM5-6.....................good
AM7......................p. 45 upside-down
AM8......................p. 32 twice

Modules

M01-M03................good
M04......................p. 32 twice
M05......................POOR SCAN; pagination completely bass-ackwards (!): 3, 37...4, 38, 39, TOC (!!!).

That last one really takes the prize for WORST SCAN.
On the whole I was pleased that many were well-scanned without any discernable issues. The poorly-scanned stuff is still technically legible, but I'm gonna be poppin' aspirin after having read them. o:

However the thing that grinds my gears is the loss of some pages.

That's my report.

END TRANSMISSION.

 

[Gadrin]

I have the JTAS CD Rom as well. A few weird ones in there too.

BTW the JTAS #17 which has the Exotic Atmospheres as part of the issue is also missing page 5 :rofl:

 

[ShapeShifter]

UPDATE: My new disk has readable PDF's for S11-13. S11 and S12 look okay, but S13 Veterans looks like it may be missing pages 34 and 38.

 

[far-trader]

Page 5 is missing from the Exotic Atmospheres pdf. I was lucky and got someone to send me a PNG of that page.

Might have been me. I thought I uploaded it to the file library too but don't see it there. Either it was taken down or never uploaded. I'll see if I can find it again and upload it. That should be within fair usage guidelines I think.

My copy of the Traveller Book has several of the graphics colored with RED, I'm not sure if that was like that originally.

Somebody got into your computer and used a crayon on them...

...nah, not really. Yes, many of the graphics in TTB had some red. Pages 13 (love that pic), 20 (hey, it's me!), 28 (another beauty), 50 (sweet), 51 (I still chuckle at it), 54 (if they count), 102 (sharp), 110, 123, 126, 131 and 136 (if maps count), 149 (if it counts), and 161 if I didn't miss any

Not a bad way to spend a couple minutes. Leafing through TTB looking at all the art

 

[far-trader]

CT CD-ROM QUALITY CHECK

These are all I've been able to check so far:...

END TRANSMISSION.

Excellent work ShapeShifter. Please continue.

Then we just need to organize a few good citizens with access to materials to fill in the corrections for everyone. At least until Marc can get it done.

I don't think there should be a problem with providing the fixes but if one of the lucky ones who actually gets replies from Marc can check that'd be best.

 

[Gadrin]

UPDATE: My new disk has readable PDF's for S11-13. S11 and S12 look okay, but S13 Veterans looks like it may be missing pages 34 and 38.

Yeah, it looks like mine too.

I used my pdftoText.exe utility and dumped pages 37 to 39 to a text file.
The page numbers aren't at the bottom like in the visual page -37-

Too bad, I could have dumped them to a file then check to see which pages
are missing, assuming they OCR correctly of course.

I also noticed alot of the OCR is slightly off:

47. Morale: 3. Skills: Admin-I , Auto Cannon-I , Blade-I , Combat Engineering-1,
Combat Rifleman-I ,Computer-I ,Demolition-I ,Instruction-I , Laser Weapons-I ,

as instead of Skill-1 they've got Skill-I, probably a small point, but also probably occurs throughout the CD-collection.

I noticed that some of the Traveller convention is to write things like:

Planet/Subsector

and the text comes out to

PlanetlSubsector in the OCR.

>

 

[ShapeShifter]

I guess I don't mind the poor scans, it's just the missing pages that steam me up!

 

[Gadrin]

I guess I don't mind the poor scans, it's just the missing pages that steam me up!

Yes, I'm half tempted to buy a OEM version of Acrobat Professional (probably v7 to keep costs down) and then make my own versions, since I have most of the books from the Reprint series, which means my Safari Ship and others can be nice a clear.

However I don't know how to go about making a text-searchable-OCR version, that looks exactly like the original. My take would be scans to produce TIFF/GIF/PNG or JPG (whichever is easiest/smallest) and then build those into HTML files, which can be made into PDFs.

I was able to take scans from another RPG and incorporate those into HTML files ----> PDF and they're nice. This allows "consolidation" of info, meaning you can make your own little packages for specific areas of game data, instead of having to remember which PDF has what, it's all in one handy one.

However, that's probably a way-off yet. I'm not sure I really need that versus being nice to have.


>

 

[Thunderbolt]

When I looked into this, my understanding was Acrobat could do OCR itself. I had an eval version of 8 recently for a work project and the help file talked about OCR as part of processing scans.

Probably worth getting the 30 day eval and checking it out further. Mine expired during the work project so didn't get round to it.