"Conversion to PDF" Topic

I am trying to cut down on how much space that my hobby consumes, especially since it looks like I might be moving into an area where my place will be much smaller. My question is, how easy would it be to convert my magazines to PDF files? How many megabytes would the typical Military History be? Are there services that perform this service or would I need to get a scanner? If I am not reproducing them or selling them would this be kosher (when it comes to intellectual property and copyright)? Thanks!

a lot depends on the number of pixels you use when the items are scanned as the the end result file size wise.

To give you an idea how much space a PDF saves, i typed up a 2215kb word document, and this was shrunk down to 285kb when i made it into a PDF.

As for the rest of your question – how long do you want to spend making such PDFs?

The only service that I know of charges £1.20 GBP for single sided loose sheets and £2.00 GBP per page for bound but that is just a local place.

I'd think buying a scanner would be cheaper.

It's not just the cost, it's the time.

To scan a magazine without splicing the cover takes a minute a page, minimum, even with an industrial speed scanner, as you have to place each page carefully and hold down the spine. And you can't afford an industrial scanner, so add 30 seconds per page.

I used to reckon on 3 hours for an ordinary book, what with having to check all the scanned pages afterwards etc. Three very boring hours.

Unless you have a full Adobe Acrobat (not cheap) you won't be able to make your own .pdfs anyway.

The .pdf files obtained are huge if you want decent quality but then data storage is cheap these days.

As a man with 50+ scanned books and articles on his hard drive, I recommend you give up the idea.

"Unless you have a full Adobe Acrobat (not cheap) you won't be able to make your own .pdfs anyway."

Yes you can. OpenOffice has an "Export to PDF" feature.

Until I got a Windows VISTA machine (God, I hate Vista) my HP Director used to allow me to scan things and save them as .PDF

(The HP Director is incompatible with VISTA now….Grr….)

usually there are a bunch of free utils that allows you to convert to pdf scanned files. The process is boring and the file size is not always as small as shelldrake says since when you scan graphic and text the recognition doesn't work on all the text and so a lot of the page is not compressed.

Elianto
mondialterei.wordpress.com

PzGeneral – check the HP website, there are now other applications that are compatible with Vista. My HP came with the HP Solution centre. Works find under Vista.

K

Also there is a free printer driver out there called CutePDF that will act as a printer and print documents to PDF files instead of a printer. I use it all the time. Especially when I buy stuff on the net and the site say to print out your receipt. I never save html pages. I just print them as pdfs. Works great.

good alternative is primopdf. Works the same way.

K

"Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner."

Standard UK copyright notice. I imagine that the same applies in the US and elsewhere.

As a publisher myself, I would like to say that I'd be happy for someone to do what you suggest with copies of my magazine that you have already bought, as long as it is strictly for your own perrsonal use, but the trouble is that PDF documents are -- as their name implies -- extremely portable, and evidence found on TMP and elsewhere has shown that the online community takes a pretty cavalier attitide to copyright law.

However, the law clearly states that you should be contacting Military History magazine, not the members of TMP! :-) I imagine that, like me, they will respect honesty about what you wish to do -- but will sue you to kingdom come if the work ever turns up elsewhere. I know for a fact, for example, that a few years ago Osprey threatened someone with a million-dollar lawsuit unless they removed images from a website, and I believe there has been another similar case recently.

Another point: the act of scanning your magazines may produce an unwanted effect on the pictures called "moiré". This is because the photos are reproduced using millions of tiny dots of ink that are laid out in microscopic rows on the page. (Just look under a powerful magnifier at any magazine image, whether coloour or black and white). When you scan an image, you define the resolution you want in the scanner software, and this may, in fact, clash directly with the 'screen' used to print the magazine, producing a strange pattern on the finished result. You may have seen this effect on TV if someone is wearing dog-tooth pattern clothing.

To eliminate this, your scanner may have a 'de-screen' setting, which slightly blurs the image to eliminate the moiré effect.

Henry
Battlegames

Henry,

Oh God, moire patterns! I used to run a line camera for a newspaper and the ban of my existence was trying to get a clear shot of something previously published while immersing my hands in nasty chemicals. I can't believe that is still a problem! Not the chemicals, but the moire.

"Yes you can. OpenOffice has an "Export to PDF" feature."

It's a feature I use a lot, but only from text.

Embedding 200 pages of scanned text into OpenOffive and then saving as .pdf is a recipe for utter tedium. Many scanners will let you save directly, but you can't edit it. So ONE mistake, and you start from the beginning, or you learn to love mistakes.

(BTW, although I have lots of scanned books on my system, they are out of copyright.)

I`ve been thinking about this for a while now, not scanning the whole magazine – just the relevent interesting pages. I must be honest sometimes the glossies arrive with only 2-3 sides of interesting material to me, yet I have to store the whole mag.

We`ve been considering a move to Spain from the UK and the idea of shifting hundreds of magazines Vs just a box of discs is quite appealing.

These would of course be for personal use not for re-sale or distribution.

A useful alternative to scanning dozens of pages is to simply take photographs of them with a camera. Any camera that can take passable pictures of miniatures should be able to take photographs of the pages quickly and painlessly. Furthermore, they'll be in JPG format, which you can quickly browse through using the Microsoft Picture and Fax Viewer (or favourite image viewing program). Use the Macro mode, and make sure the camera has focused on the page before triggering the shutter release. If you're planning to take a lot of photos, setting up a tripod would make life easier.

I've used this to great effect on lecture notes, written documents and even comics. Use your favourite image editing program's "Batch" function to quickly apply "Auto-Levels" to all the images, and they should turn out great.

Cheers