In article ,
Dave Platt wrote:

| In article ,
| John Smith wrote:
|
| I don't think you grasp what is being done here... I am not even
| contemplating using it... but transforming it into other formats
| for others use... 33 megs is pretty big for a book... down about
| one-meg would be more useful...
|
| Getting it down to 1 meg would necessarily sacrifice almost all of the
| detail in the photographs - they'd be unviewable. 1 meg might be
| enough space for the text, and possibly for the black&white charts and
| line drawings (as bitmaps) but the photos would be lost.

The reason it's 33 MB and not 1 MB is because the .pdf file is
basically a bunch of pictures, one of each page. That's also why it's
not searchable, and why you can't cut and paste text out of it.

33 MB is on the small side for books scanned like this.

In comparison, the Bible is only 1.34 MB in size in text format after
being compressed (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10) -- and it's a big
book. Even War and Peace is only 1.16 MB
(http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2600).

In order to get it under 1 MB, you'd generally have to use some sort
of OCR software to convert the picture of text into text. I presume
there would also be some pictures, and they'd have to be stored as
pictures, of course.

Unfortunately, good OCR software is hard to find, and I know of no
software that could take a book, scan it, convert it to text and
images as appropriate, and do it accurately enough that a human
wouldn't need to proofread the entire document carefully. And that is
a very large job.

The reason it's available with BitTorrent is because that allows lots
of people to download it relatively quickly without totally sucking up
his bandwidth. It may be a bit more work to download than something
that's just a link on a web page, but it works nicely once set up.

In any event, scanning and distributing out of copyright books like
this is a worthy endeavor. Thank you!

Looks like there's a few other radio related works on Project
Gutenberg. Go to `http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/search' and
search for `radio' for a list. None seem to cover antennas
specifically, but ` The Radio Amateur's Hand Book' looks interesting.


--
Doug McLaren,
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.