DISPLAY - German complement to 65Notes + TI material [for our german reading fellows]

[Etienne Victoria]

Hi all,

Sorting out a couple of documents, I found an edition of the german "DISPLAY" magazine (perfect bound, around 350 pages) which looks like a mix between a 65-Notes complement from the German chapter and additional TI material.

I found a couple of articles interesting such as the one covering an HP-65 printer. A funny aspect is that the color pictures are actually real pictures glued to the magazine.

Would there be any interest in making these available to all? Or was this already covered/archived somewhere ?

As I have no more access to a decent scanner, I'd have to find a scanning solution somewhere. I have included below a couple of pictures.

If this has been covered already, you can safely dismiss this post :-)

Etienne

DISPLAY

[Klaus Overhage]

Hello Etienne,

that looks very interesting and nicely complete. This is all new to me and I would be happy to scan them and pay for the postage to me and back.

Regards
Klaus from Germany

[AndiGer]

Sounds interesting. Cool Stuff ... Would be surely be of interest to the public.
Never heard of that magazine.
Andi

[Etienne Victoria]

Thanks Klaus !

The material will go back to homeland tomorrow.

Best regards

Etienne

(09-21-2024 02:30 PM)Klaus Overhage Wrote:  Hello Etienne,

that looks very interesting and nicely complete. This is all new to me and I would be happy to scan them and pay for the postage to me and back.

Regards
Klaus from Germany

[Martin Hepperle]

(09-21-2024 01:08 PM)Etienne Victoria Wrote:  [...]
A funny aspect is that the color pictures are actually real pictures glued to the magazine.
[...]

Very interesting.

Maybe these were proofs to be sent to the printer? I cannot imagine, that the actual magazine came with the pictures glued in.

At least the color pages should be scanned in color, the others will probably give a better result when scanned in black and white.

Martin

[Klaus Overhage]

Etienne has kindly sent me the three folders, for which I would like to say thank you very much. They contain 12 issues of the German club magazine DISPLAY from July 1975 to June 1979. The main focus is on the HP-65, but there are also many articles/programs for the SR-52 and HP-25.
There are articles on all these calculators:
HP-19C, HP-25, HP-33E, HP-35, HP-55, HP-65, HP-67/97
Texas Instruments SR-52, SR-56, TI-57, TI-59 (including PC-100)
Commodore PET
and mathematics in General

The biggest challenge in processing the scans was the lack of margins. At that time, the paper page was really used in its entirety and on many pages the text went right to the edge of the page. I added margins during processing so that the pages could be printed and filed.

The text recognition (OCR) worked well, so that the German texts could be copied and translated if necessary.

If anyone has any other issues of this magazine I would be happy to scan them. Please send me a PM to clarify whether I can borrow or buy them.

I hope the following links to my dropbox work. I don't have a website and would be very happy if someone could add these PDF's to their homepage.

DISPLAY-V1N1.pdf

DISPLAY-V1N2.pdf

DISPLAY-V1N3.pdf

DISPLAY-V1N4.pdf

DISPLAY-V1N5.pdf

DISPLAY-V2N1.pdf

DISPLAY-V2N2.pdf

DISPLAY-V2N3.pdf

DISPLAY-V2N4.pdf

DISPLAY-V4N5&6.pdf

DISPLAY-V5N1&2.pdf

DISPLAY-V5N3.pdf

DISPLAY-V5N4&5.pdf (Original paper edition provided by DimoG)

DISPLAY-V6N1&2.pdf (Original paper edition provided by DimoG)

Regards
Klaus

[Felix Gross]

Thanks Etienne and Klaus!

DISPLAY has been missing for a long while. Wonderful material from the early days.

If someone could find the missing issues, that would be fantastic.

Felix

[charger73]

Thank you all, wonderful Christmas reading.

[Thomas Klemm]

Have fun playing HP-25 MASTER MIND.
Thank's a lot for providing these documents.

(11-14-2024 01:28 PM)Klaus Overhage Wrote:  The text recognition (OCR) worked well, so that the German texts could be copied and translated if necessary.

It still needed a bit of a manual cleanup but it certainly made it much easier.

[knife31]

Thanks a bunch, lets me catch up on my Deutsch.
RH

[Etienne Victoria]

Hi all,

The big thank YOU goes to Klaus.

Awesone work and quality scans!

I actually prefer reading the issues separated and scanned than in the original bulky bindings.

If I ever grasp similar content, I'll gladly send it over.

Etienne

[Klaus Overhage]

Today there are two more DISPLAY issues available for download. Many thanks to DimoG for sending me the originals. I have scanned them and added them to the list above. They also contain articles on the HP-34C and HP-41C.

Scanning was easy this time because the originals only had single staples. With an automatic feeder, the 120 pages per issue were no problem. Surprisingly, page 87 from V3N4&5 can be seen instead of page 30 in DISPLAY-V6N1&2. In the original it is upside down...

Have fun with it.

[Martin Hepperle]

Thank you for all these scans. This new material may also help to reconstruct the transition from the first HP computer club MICAC to the later CCD. I already found some CCD PRISMA authors in the MICAC member list.

BTW: concerning PDF translation tools:
This type of material is rather difficult for automatic translation because it contains listings, images and line graphics. Additionally some scanning residues or poor print quality may cause problems.
Not everything on a page should be translated. Is there a tool which allows selective translation, e.g. manually drawing a frame on a PDF page and then ask it to translate (and fit the translation into that frame) only what is inside the frame?

When I started to use use OCR in the 1980s, there was OCR software which allowed for creating regions and specify whether each region contains text, tables with text, tables with numbers, line graphics or color images. Each region was treated differently to obtain good results.

Martin

[Thomas Klemm]

(Yesterday 01:01 PM)Martin Hepperle Wrote:  This type of material is rather difficult for automatic translation because it contains listings, images and line graphics. Additionally some scanning residues or poor print quality may cause problems.

(11-15-2024 09:23 AM)Thomas Klemm Wrote:  

(11-14-2024 01:28 PM)Klaus Overhage Wrote:  The text recognition (OCR) worked well, so that the German texts could be copied and translated if necessary.

It still needed a bit of a manual cleanup but it certainly made it much easier.

This is just my experience with a single page but I'm afraid that there's not really a tool that could extract the text and programs automatically.

[Klaus Overhage]

Hello Martin,
first I scan one image per page in 600dpi in PNG format. Then I use the free Windos program XnView recommended by Eric Rechlin for rotating, coloring edges white and increasing contrast.

With PhotoScape, double-sided scans are split in the middle. The PDF24 Toolbox from the PDF24 Creator then merges the images into a PDF, takes over the text recognition and as a final step I use it to reduce the resolution from 600dpi to 400dpi to halve the file size.

These programs do not offer the option of marking certain areas as text. In the finished PDF, one individual section can be marked with the mouse while holding down the Alt key. This makes it easier to copy half of the pages in landscape format. If you want to continue working on the PDFs, I can provide you with the 600dpi versions of the files. This may be helpful for a new OCR.
Regards Klaus

[Martin Hepperle]

Klaus,

thank you for the description of the process.

When I scanned the PRISMA journal, I used a similar sequence, but started with an office scanner/copier which directly gave me a PDF of the 2-up pages. I scanned in 400 dpi b/w to avoid fuzzy grayscale effects (tested printing on a b/w laser printer) and keep the file size within limits.

For splitting the pages and OCR, I used Acrobat professional, which offers a scripting engine where I could write a short Javascript function to split the pages from A3 into two A4 pages and another one for sorting the pages (as the original issues were A3 format stapled in the center and I scanned the complete A3 sheets).
Similar scripts were used to split the 4-pages-up documentation e.g. for the HP-75.

Nowadays I use a python script for similar jobs and the pypdf library which can also be used to split pages (like the attached one).
In my split routines for scanned, bound books I add some 5 mm extra space at the page centers, to compensate for the binding of books which I cannot cut.

I just found out that the commercial Foxit PDF Editor allows applying OCR also to a selection, i.e. a rectangular region created by dragging the mouse - I was not aware of this feature. This would leave graphics and other stuff intact and would not hinder later text searching in the PDF by stumbling across text fragments in images and listings.

The thing to avoid are OCR systems which replace the original text. For example the Foxit tools offer either "hidden text over image" (which is o.k.) or "replacing image by text" (which destroys the original).
I came across several older Epson printer manuals from Epsons official web site which were scanned and processed by Epson with the text replaced and these manuals contain horrible errors in technical content.

Martin