{"id":14252,"date":"2017-08-22T10:02:53","date_gmt":"2017-08-22T14:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=14252"},"modified":"2017-08-22T10:02:53","modified_gmt":"2017-08-22T14:02:53","slug":"big-old-scanned-manuals-to-small-old-scanned-manuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2017\/08\/22\/big-old-scanned-manuals-to-small-old-scanned-manuals\/","title":{"rendered":"Big old scanned manuals to small old scanned manuals"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is good that there are so many scanned manuals for old computer systems out there. Every old system did things its very own special way, and life’s too short to guess. I mean, there’s not much out there on the SYM-1 I’m trying to get working again:
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u201d not much except<\/em> for 6502.org’s excellent Synertek SYM-1 Resources<\/a>, that is.<\/p>\n

Some manuals, though, while lovingly scanned, are just too large to download, browse or file. Take, for instance, AppleIIScans’ Apple II BASIC Programming With ProDOS<\/a>. It’s a very faithful colour scan, but at 170 MB for 280 pages, it’s a bit unwieldy. I suspect it’s Adobe Acrobat Paper Capture’s fault: while it makes turning scans into readable files really easy, it doesn’t warn against using 600 dpi full colour for a book with only decorative use of colour.<\/p>\n

Good old Ghostscript<\/a> saves the day, though:<\/p>\n

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=Gray -dProcessColorModel=\/DeviceGray -dPDFSETTINGS=\/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -q -sOutputFile=1983-A2L2013-m-a2-bpwp-grey.pdf -- 1983-A2L2013-m-a2-bpwp.pdf<\/pre>\n
By downsampling the scanned images and converting everything to greyscale, the result’s only 16 MB. All text and indexing from Acrobat is left intact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is good that there are so many scanned manuals for old computer systems out there. Every old system did things its very own special way, and life’s too short to guess. I mean, there’s not much out there on the SYM-1 I’m trying to get working again: \u00e2\u20ac\u201d not much except for 6502.org’s excellent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[813,2067,765,2556,807],"class_list":["post-14252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-ghostscript","tag-manual","tag-pdf","tag-retrocomputing","tag-scan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-3HS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14252"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14255,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14252\/revisions\/14255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}