"What does "with Text" mean..." Topic

…when Downloading a .pdf file?

And how do you find it?

(Basically an Archive.org question).

Thanks in advance,

Andrew

Example… all of the Russian "Battle" magazines (Osprey like) offer additional "with Text" when you choose the .pdf option, but I can never find the "additional text". It could be an English text translation, but I can't find it to know what it is.

Any help would be appreciated!

You'd have to compare two files to be sure, but one possibility is that "with text" means the files has been through OCR.

Some old books and magazines get run through a scanner and each page in the PDF is essentially just a photo of that page. That's easy to make, but you cannot search the text and you cannot copy and paste out of the text because there is no text, just a picture of the page with the text on it. This also creates a relatively large PDF.

If you run this through additional software and spend some time tweaking Optical Character Recognition and so on will create a PDF with the text in it. This takes some effort because the software can't always tell when the text is in two columns, what text is a picture caption, and what text is in a sidebar, etc. This is a smaller and more useful PDF, but takes more effort to make.

This may be the distinction they are trying to make with the phrase "with text".

Ahhh…okay, that helps immensely, Andrew W., very much appreciated.

The trick is, if offered, there is usually the regular ".pdf" version and the "w/text", so I always thought there was something more "there", so to speak!

Download them both to be sure. See if "w/text" is smaller. Smaller is good. See if you can copy and search. If so that's the one you want. The only advantage of the all-image PDF is that it won't have any OCR errors in it.

Here you go, Andrew…

link

w/Text is considerably smaller.

Something went wrong with the scan, I can't read a word of it.

It's in Russian (Cyrillic).

(was joking)

Grrrr!