Badly Photocopied Manuals!

[mole42uk]

Originally Posted by Chris55000

On a side note, this is why I find my SPlan software so good - it can be used just as easily and quickly to draw out a thermionic-valve circuit to post on this forum as a transistorised/IC-based one -

It's a shame that SPlan is another example of Windows-only software. It looks quite good, but I don't have a computer running Windows :-(

[trh01uk]

There was a time - I am thinking over 20 years ago - when computer storage space was expensive, and thus file size for scanned copies was critical. Furthermore, if the files were to be shared over the internet, people didn't want to deal with huge files, some 10s MBs in size. There were no file sharing facilities back then as I recall. The best you could do was to construct a website (and pay for the storage), and expect people to be patient while their downloads completed.

I suspect Mauritron did a lot of their scanning back in those days. Their scans lack sufficient resolution, and are invariably in black and white (1-bit mode) when often using 256 level grayscale could have given a much better image. They even used 1-bit mode for greyscale photos which renders many of them totally useless.

I saw all that around 2001 when I was presented with a huge tranche of manuals as the "vmars archive". I then set to learning how to scan stuff, and to produce copies that were of "archive quality". That is they had to have sufficient resolution (300dpi min was what I worked out), and only use black/white mode when appropriate. Furthermore extensive "digital repairs" had to be done to paper copies that arrived in poor condition, with torn pages, sellotape repairs etc. It didn't cost a lot in expensive software - it just needed huge amounts of patience in getting good with ordinary tools.

At that time, the copies I produced for the vmars archive were some of the best on the internet. Most were junk - as noted by others on here - nearly useless for any meaningful purpose, such as actually understanding the diagrams, reading parts lists, etc.

In time, others started doing the same thing - though I am in no way suggesting I was the first or even influential on other people.

There can be no excuse these days for poor copy - it can only be laziness - and the inappropriate use of "machine scanners". These are automated systems designed to take in bucket loads of A4 sheets, letters and the like, produced by offices trying to reduce their paper mountain. They produce very poor copy indeed from many vintage documents, which often have black text turned grey, and white paper turned brown.

I see good quality copies of manuals and other paperwork being an essential component in the saving of electronics history - regardless of the particular variety people are interested in. If you come across an anonymous lump of electronics - for which there is no manual available - then its simply a box with electronic bits in. It will probably get junked because no-one knows what it is, and the world is now awash with electronic junk.

Richard

[stevehertz]

... If you come across an anonymous lump of electronics - for which there is no manual available - then its simply a box with electronic bits in. It will probably get junked because no-one knows what it is, and the world is now awash with electronic junk.

Personally I have no interest in anonymous lumps of electronics, to me the problem is more a case of coming across a known (non-anonymous) lump of electronics and still not being able to get the data for it. For example, I can't get full service data for a Tandberg Huldra 12 receiver, nor a user manual for a Sansui 8900ZDB. I'm sure they existed at one time, neither are out of the ark, but just not available.

[trh01uk]

Yes, I know that's frustrating too. We obviously operate in quite different fields. No doubt you can tell roughly what the function of a Tandberg Huldra 12 is - at least you know its a "receiver".

I turn up lumps of electronics with either no identifying marks at all, or a set of numbers (often military) which leave one totally baffled. Often the numbers when put into Google render not even a single hit. And the function of the device is far from clear - even if the knobs have clear markings on them. At that point such "lumps" may well go in the skip.

Richard

[winston_1]

Hitachi manuals were particularly bad for this. As their spares department in Hayes was a short bike ride from work I frequently took one back I could not read. Their excuse was Japan only supplied enough manuals to supply each official dealer. They farmed out photocopying so had no control.

Pretty poor I thought, why didn't they reject them.

[emeritus]

I seem to remember someone complaining in the old "Television" magazine that one of the Japanese manufacturers only issued service manuals on DVD that were encoded so that they would not be readable after a cut-off date.

[Chris55000]

Hi!

I seem to remember someone complaining in the old "Television" magazine that one of the Japanese manufacturers only issued service manuals on DVD that were encoded so that they would not be readable after a cut-off date

That was one of Sony's tricks, and I've a sneaking suspicion JVC and Hitachi might have done it as well!

There are ways of circumventing this sort of nonsense, but more to the point why is such nonsense perpetrated by manufacturers in the first place? - it to try and "force" dealers, etc., not to maintain products after the (short!) readable life of the data disc?

The obvious question is, what happens when "old" discs time-out and the manuals contained on it aren't on any later discs?

Chris Williams

[julie_m]

CDs and DVDs are read-only media, so any expiry date enforcement will be done in software -- and therefore, easily circumvented by running in a Virtual Machine with a mis-set clock. A quick Bash one-liner will let another VM running a Linux distribution emulate a PostScript printer on the network, and dump its output through GhostScript to create read-anywhere PDFs from the original proprietary-format manuals .....