One problem with the Australian Archives is that it charges like a wounded bull for photocopying - 50c per page. So when I found a 350 page document that I was interested in, I knew that getting them to photocopy it for me was not the answer.
However, the archives will make a digital copy of five documents per person per year for free. So I asked for a digital copy to be made.
This was on 17 October. Yesterday, they put it up so it could be accessed online from RecordSearch. Three hundred and fifty colour JPGs -- one per page!
So I wrote a Perl script to suck them all down onto my hard disk. Then coded up a C# program to turn them into a single PDF document.
What on Earth the people who can't program do I wouldn't know. Maybe they just make everybody do CompSci 101 these days.
However, the archives will make a digital copy of five documents per person per year for free. So I asked for a digital copy to be made.
This was on 17 October. Yesterday, they put it up so it could be accessed online from RecordSearch. Three hundred and fifty colour JPGs -- one per page!
So I wrote a Perl script to suck them all down onto my hard disk. Then coded up a C# program to turn them into a single PDF document.
What on Earth the people who can't program do I wouldn't know. Maybe they just make everybody do CompSci 101 these days.
- Current Mood:
mischievous - Current Music:Ariel - Life for Rent
Comments
(goggles) And they call that a digital copy? Haven't they heard of Optical Character Recognition? Or was the thing hand-written or something?
Does your single PDF document consist of 350 images, or did you manage to do more?
view
the document here. You'll need Javascript turned on.
My PDF contains exactly 351 pages -- they didgitised the cover as well. It's typed. So I will give the OCR program a go and see what it comes up with. It will require a script too of course.
They don't normally OCR documents because so many have handwriting. The choice of resolution is, I think, to make the scans smaller.