Not sure if this is well known The Boat Anchor Manual Archive
Yup. Me &
BAMA go WAY back; I remember getting manuals off there for my Hitachi V212 almost 20 years ago. In fact, when neo asked me what he owed me for that bracket I printed, I told him to pay it forward instead and just donate whatever he sees fit to KO4BB.com or bama.edebris.com. Good people. They've earned our support.
How did you manage to suck it from the site and make PDF's? All I get from the site is a small cover as a .JPG. I have Winrar as well but cannot see just how you get at the document in order convert it to a pdf. I cannot even see a document.
How big is the file you have? If it's a few K, you just saved a thumbnail image that served as a hotlink.
If it's a few MB, it's the full doc. With a small jpg prefixed to the archive. The beauty of Winrar (and 7zip) is that if you run them and tell them to open any specified file as if it is an archive, they actually try to search through the file for an archive.
So a 'RARbook' is a small jpg, prefixed on a rar archive, in one file, with a .jpg filename suffix.
Result: the OS displays the small image (which serves as a 'book cover'), while Winrar can extract the archived file contents.
You could change the suffix to .rar, but then the file won't display as the cover image.
It's far from ideal, but it's BETTER than PDF, in which the contained file subcomponents can only be extracted with great and tedious effort. PDF is designed to be an impenetrable container.
See also http://everist.org/archives/scans/RAR-books/_about_rar_books/
You can fiddle-fart around with your .pngs scattered loose in a folder like old Polaroids in the bottom of a drawer. I'll keep using dynamic formats like .pdf and .rtf, thank you.
I wonder if you noticed that there is a .html file in that folder. Did you try opening it? It seems not.
Viola! The whole document as a single entity. Using a browser to scroll and zoom, which works very well indeed.
The folder of images is just another form of wrapper, exactly as PDF is, EXCEPT that you have the option of easily looking at the individual pages and images if you want.
Using html for structure also gives vast advantages over PDF, in flexibility, structural visibility and how the content is presented, indexed and formatted. I just usually only bother to make a simple linear document.
And all of this, is because I expect there to be a decent, sensible and functional container format someday, and it will be a lot easier to convert simple, totally visible-structure html+images docs over, than from the dog's vomit of a format that is PDF.
To quote someone else's recent comment: "PDF is where information goes to die."
Incidentally another reason I prefer to keep the image files visible, is that while creating them I control the process of choosing encoding type, to best suit the images and optimize compression within limits _I_ choose. Rather than some braindead auto-PDF construction algorithm.
Yes, I noticed it. Good lord man... you think I don't recognize a bundled HTML document when I see one?
Yes, they're open. You can see every piece of the puzzle. But
that is what's wrong with them; they are a puzzle that you have to put together to use. They are also a total clusterfuck, not at all intuitive to use and still don't offer half the features of the pdf FORMAT. And unless you're a savant who ENJOYS parsing raw HTML
with your brain, there's no way you as a reader can be certain there isn't some poisoned link in that .html document, so it isn't even secure.
Again, you're blind hatred of everything Adobe is understandable; I loathe them viscerally myself. But the format is OPEN, scalable, and integrates EVERYTHING people want in a platform-independent portable document.
You may in fact be this guy; and you may be right. But so far, the day has not come, and the world's tiniest fiddle isn't playing, and the world's largest archival site still serves .pdf files 10:1 over all other filetypes combined. Even .mp3. And anybody still on FuckBook deserves what they get.
And that guy's "tiniest open-source violin" STILL isn't visible; NOT because it's so tiny, but because nobody has the effing extension installed that it needs to be viewable.While you're busy busting your nuts trying to NOT use the de-facto standard in archival document storage, the rest of the world is carrying on, and I'm pretty sure that I'll be dead and buried long before the .pdf format is.
This all kind of misses the point of PDFs though:
1. Vector graphics container
2. Print format
3. Searchable
4. Easily citable references
5. Simple one file per text container that doesn't need processing.
6. Portable across different devices.
7. Table of contents and document structure metadata.
PDF is mostly misunderstood. MacOS uses it for Quartz, their 2D UI stuff. One reason it doesn't look like boiled testicles on a high DPI display.
When you bundle scans into a PDF file it's a hack but it works. You can OCR and full text the content at the same time and make the scans searchable.
Also PDF is an open standard: https://www.iso.org/standard/63534.html ... RAR is not and the license is somewhat dubiously lacking.
Thanks for bullet-pointing all the stuff I
TRIED to explain a while back but had trouble quantifying. I know .pdf is an open format. I know it does all these things and actually works. Everywhere they have computers. You can even open a .pdf on a Raspberry Pi, FFS.
Again... the problem is NOT the FORMAT. It works. It is the file creation software and the dumbasses who use it wrong that suck.
mnem