
Archive for the 'website links' Category

Another new blog

This is the only blog that I have ever contributed to. But some of my interests are outside the scope of Thoughts on Antiquity.  So I thought that I might try starting my own blog, and see if anyone is interested in what I have to say.  I shall continue to blog here from time to time as well, however.

Using Lulu.com to get copies of books

Once I got interested in Arabic Christian Literature, I quickly found that the only book of use was Georg Graf’s 5 volume Geschichte der arabischen christlichen Literatur, published 50 years ago by the Vatican library.  I was able to buy volumes 2-5 online, but not volume 1.  The first two volumes deal with literature up to 1500, so are really the only part that would interest readers of this blog.

In this post, I mentioned that I intended to try using the print-on-demand service, lulu.com, to make a personal copy of volume 1.  Indeed I did so, and perhaps my experience will be of use to others.

My first step was to borrow the book from the library, and run it through a scanner to create a directory of images, one per page.  This took quite a while, because it’s 700-odd pages!  I used Finereader 8.0 OCR software, not to do OCR but simply to manage the scanning.  I used an OpticBook 3600 book scanner (very cheap and very fast) to scan each page. 

In FineReader you can crop the pages to the same size, and erase dots etc.  I did this, producing images with only small margins.  You can also export all the pages to create an image-only PDF, and so I did, getting a 50mb PDF.

At this point I got rather ahead of myself, and omitted a crucial step, but I found this out later. 

I opened an account on lulu.com (which is free), and started to create a book.  To do this, you choose a paper size and binding.  In my case this was 7.44″ x 9.68″, perfect binding.  The site prompts you to upload a PDF, which is pretty awkward and fails a lot.  I found that I had to follow the alternative path given on the site ‘for large files’ and upload my PDF using FTP.

When I had uploaded it, the site warned me that my PDF pages were smaller than the paper size.  This meant that it would resize them.  Foolish chap that I was, I presumed they would add white space.  But this was wrong… they stretched the pages.  They were still readable, but looked a bit odd.

You’re also asked whether your book should be made available to the public for sale (with whatever markup on cost you choose); only available on a private URL; or only available to you.  I chose the latter, in case there were copyright issues.

The site allows you to design your own cover — I did this in a basic way.  You then get to see the PDF that results from all of this, which they send to a printer.  You save, and that’s it.  A link appears, offering you the chance to buy a copy yourself, which I did.  For this volume the cost price was about $22, and the postage was extra of course.  Manufacture of the book takes 3-5 days, and then the post office do their thing for however long they like.

In my case it was three weeks before it arrived.  It looked perfectly acceptable; except for the slightly stretched letters.

What I should have done, after scanning the images and cleaning and cropping them, was to pad them with whitespace myself before making the PDF.  This is something that Finereader doesn’t let you do.  But it stores the images in .tif format, so you can use other tools on them. 

Since there were 700-odd files, I wasn’t going to do this by hand!  I used a free command-line tool called ImageMagick.  I don’t know it well, but it did the trick.  I found that I needed an up-to-date version.

Now the TIF files from Finereader all include a thumbnail.  This makes them hard to work with.  What I did was write a little .com file containing a series of commands:

convert 0001.tif 0001.png

convert 0002.tif 0002.png

convert 0003.tif 0003.png

...

This gave errors, but converted all the pages to png format.  I had to do this, because the next step wouldn’t work if I did it on the TIF files directly.

I then wrote another batch file:

convert 0001-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872   0001-ok.png

convert 0002-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872   0002-ok.png

convert 0003-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872   0003-ok.png

...

This took all the pages and plonked each of them in the middle of a white background sized 2978 by 3872 pixels.  I knew that this was the size of the pages in the ‘print ready’ PDF that lulu.com had generated (because I downloaded it, opened it in Finereader, and got the size of the image of page 1 in pixels).

Then I created a new Finereader project, read in all those PNG’s at one go, saved them as a PDF, and this time had a PDF which was of the correct dimensions.

I’ve just finished uploading that, and bought a new copy of it.  It ought to be perfect.

The PDF’s that we find on archive.org and the like are generally of low resolution, so I don’t know if they could be used for this.  I scanned Graf at 400 dpi; the PDF of Agapius that I have been looking at on archive.org was 200 dpi.  So we may all have to scan our own books.

But this clearly works.  If you need a copy of an out-of-print and unobtainable book for private research purposes, you don’t have to rely on a pile of photocopies.  We all have piles and piles of those, I know!  But no; scan them instead, save your floor space, and print them at lulu.com.  You could even produce compilations in this way.  You could print extracts, ring bound, with blank pages between each opening.  All sorts of things are possible.

Of course if you made them available to anyone else, you would need to be sure that they were out of copyright.  If it is in print, buy a proper copy.  But if it’s a 19th century library catalogue, this is probably a nice way to get your own copy.

8th August 2008: the printed copy arrived, and it’s perfect!

Corpus Parisinum of the Greek Gnomologia finally published

Collections of sayings by philosophers and other bums are known as gnomologia – the idea being that they contain gnomic wisdom.  These things exercised quite a bit of influence in antiquity.

One of the most famous collections of these is the Corpus Parisinum, so called because it is preserved in a massive manuscript (Ms. Paris graecus 1168) in the French National Library.  It’s never been published, but it’s a central witness if you are trying to trace the history of a saying.

 Well, it has now been edited!  Dennis Searby has made a critical edition, with English translation, and Dimitri Gutas supplied a preface.  I only wonder how I can get a look at a copy!

PS: There’s a table of contents here.  One section (CP2) is pagan prophecies of the coming of Christ which didn’t make it into Maximus the Confessor.  Dr Searby kindly sent me his intro to that section.  The book is 1,000 pages, in two volumes, and looks like a treasure trove of valuable information.

Another collection of classical texts in English translation

Delighted to find this site, Theoi, contains a lot of translations of obscure classical authors. The site is New Zealand based, and most of the translations are from the Loeb library. Lots of these are actually out of copyright in the USA because the copyright was not renewed as the law required. I’m not sure of the details of NZ copyright law, but plainly it makes some good stuff available!

It’s great news to have all this online.  For instance, the Library of Apollodorus is a 2nd century handbook of Greek mythology, and so is one of our best primary sources for this subject.  The only thing that I found to regret is the copyright notice at the bottom, which claims copyright of the HTML formatting.  Whether this claim is legally valid I do not know (although it would seem untested at best); whether the site owner could really defend it I don’t know either (although that seems doubtful); but it’s ungenerous.  Freely you received, freely give.

On another note, we need to take the time to support the Loeb library, I think.  As a rule I have refrained from scanning material from it.  Hey, some of these volumes sell less than a dozen copies a year!  That won’t pay for storage even.

The Loeb series is our only popular series which prints both the Latin or Greek alongside the English.  The volumes have got cheaper over the years and now cost very little.  They are a treasure.   Let’s appreciate them.

Latin inscriptions database

I’ve today discovered the following database site which has the text of almost all Latin inscriptions in it:

 http://www.manfredclauss.de/gb/index.html

A search for ‘invicto’ brought up quite a few!

Patristic blog

I had something nice happen to me today.  I was writing some notes on John bar Zo’bi here and found, to my delight, that someone had picked up on an extract from his works which I had scanned and uploaded ages ago.  It seems that we have another patristic blogger!

http://patristicpage.blogspot.com/

I remember having to force myself to scan that, and did so only because it was offline and never likely to come online.  Somehow finding that someone thought it worth reposting makes it all worthwhile!

Tomorrow I must go back to work, to a new role at the same place doing stuff that I don’t much care for. I find that I’m frankly dreading it — indeed had nightmares about it last night — which is never a good sign. Still, only 8 weeks of it and then I’m free of that job. The money may help to pay for some translation work.

Copyright issues blog

By chance I came across an interesting blog, Collectanea, devoted to discussion of the absurdities of the over-extensive copyright law in the digital age.  There any many interesting snippets in this.  Most interesting is the rise in sales of books indexed by Google books, leading to the probable consequence of a settlement of lawsuits against Google by publishers.   Another snippet is finding others, like myself, devoted to the Public Domain.  Apparently a new Creative Commons license has arrived, specifically to make this possible. 

Greek texts online complete

A couple of interesting pages which I stumbled across while looking for material about the engineer Philo of Byzantium (ca. 250 BC).  The first points to a lot of Greek texts online:

http://www.mikrosapoplous.gr/en/linksen.html

The second is a French site with a vast collection of PDF’s of medical writers, such as Galen:

http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica.htm

Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik (ZPE) old issues online

From the PAPY-L list I learn of these, at

http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/ifa/zpe/downloads

A number of the articles are in English. Papyrology resources are at

http://www.ulb.ac.be/assoc/aip/liens.htm

Migne online

I have just discovered the Documenta Catholica Omnia site.  This seems to contain a very large chunk of materials, including a lot of the Patrologia Latina.  Worth a look, anyhow.



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