Do incomplete documentation scans help or hurt the scene?

[Keatah]

Just today I came across several manual scans that looked like half of them were purposely not scanned due to sheer laziness. Or for some other reason, like a bait. A try-before-you-buy ad. Weird, but true.

 

Incomplete scans or bad/blurry scans actually hinder the scene. And that's because once they are posted - most people consider the job is done and do not take initiative to post a better, clearer, more complete version. What's posted us just good enough.

 

Oftentimes the incomplete posting isn't even looked at, just archived away. Creating the implication that that title is "taken care of" - no further action needed.

[Bruce Tomlin]

Some people just stack pages onto a sheet feed scanner and don't even check for pages that got stuck together or dogeared. I've seen that with magazine scans too.

[Keatah]

That could happen too. But the lamest excuse is a complete scan takes too much bandwidth. What?!? In this day and age people are concerned about filesizes and transfer times of a 10MB vs 25MB file? Give me a fucking break. Toddlers routinely spit and drool on babysitting devices that can xfer 25MB in like 2 seconds. I suppose that kinda nonsense originates from the old-guard unix and linux crowd.

[carlsson]

Could it sometimes be the case of someone owns a xeroxed copy of a manual, and that some pages are missing from that copy but instead of scanning nothing at all, they scan the pages that still exist? Perhaps sometimes it isn't even obvious until you read it in detail that some chapter or appendix is missing?

[Keatah]

Possibly. Yes. But unfortunately the community at large suddenly thinks we now have docs for program x! And won't upload a corrected & updated version.

[carlsson]

That is funny compared to other parts of the community like software archiving where people generally have no problems preserving the same program over and over in minor versions, with different cracker intros etc. I don't know exactly which documents you have encountered that were incomplete, but I'll assume those are reasonably common so there would be sources of complete material to re-scan. If those are very hard to find docs, there simply might not exist any more sources.

 

Then we have the collector's side of things, those who believe they're sitting on a gold mine and think that sharing any material from it would devalue the original contents. It applies both on software (various ROM files, disk images etc), hardware and possibly documentation. In particular if an individual is making copies of an old manual which they resell, with or without the original copyright holders' permission, they don't want that manual to appear scanned for general access.

[Omega-TI]

First back in the day when many of these people with good intentions scanned the original documents, they did so in a time of 'lesser technology' and 'limited storage space'.  I myself remember having to scan things on an actual 70's era Xerox copy machine... eech!  I also remember having to compress many documents to fit on a standard floppy disk to share.  I also remember when hard drives were freaking expensive and I did not want to devote 3/4 of my space for documents that were only of 'possible benefit' to others.

 

Yes, when people see that something has already been scanned, they may not be willing to step on someone else's toes by upstaging them.  However many of those scans were done decades ago, so even if the original scanner/poster is still living, I doubt they would raise a fuss if you scanned a manual. 

 

In the TI section we are lucky enough to have a guy that has been scanning tons of manuals... and I tell you, I and others sure appreciate him!

 

 

[carlsson]

Yes, that is why the e-texts were invented. Basically OCR:ing the text portion and saving as plain text files. Recreate illustrations and diagrams using ASCII art.

 

PDF was way too expensive storage wise, even if you recreated the document in Word with fonts and formatting. Nowadays it is more or less a given to store documents verbatim, perhaps apply an OCR layer for better searchability in the document.

[Omega-TI]

I made this video a while ago, but it shows the program I use to print up old... and sometimes new PDF manuals.