1983 MB Tech Data Manual
1983 MB Tech Data Manual
Recently one of these was sold, by one forum member to another. But first it passed through my hands, and I scanned the whole thing --all 571 pages of it.
It's about the size of a very thick pocket bible.
Cover:
Contents, first page:
http://i41.tinypic.com/1z306jo.jpg
An example page:
http://i44.tinypic.com/2l8zw3p.jpg
Directory view of first 100 scans:
http://i39.tinypic.com/5xu9i0.jpg
Directory view of second 100 scans:
http://i43.tinypic.com/eg9pe.jpg
Directory view of third 100 scans:
http://i42.tinypic.com/m7yiwl.jpg
Directory view of fourth small batch of scans:
http://i41.tinypic.com/4l5cu0.jpg
I am wondering how much interest there would be in my offering the complete scanned shebang for sale. Each two-page scan is a 25 MB .pnm file, and I did duplicate a few two-page scans where one section ends on the left page and a new section begins on the right page, so the whole thing is 9 GB in size. I could put it on two DVD's. Note: this is not OCR'ed, it is just a plain scan.
If there would be enough interest at $10 per two-DVD set, I will contact the copyright holders, MB North America and MB Canada, and see if I can get permission to distribute it.
Wow that is some serious data demand. I thought 1 page = 1 kb. Anywho..... i dont know what your plans for formatting are but a nice organized pdf file would probably be best. You could probably compress the file and get it to fit on one disk and lower the overhead cost a few pennies. :-)
9gb seems.huge to me.
For a .pdf I would have to OCR it. Might take about one man-year. The price would be *a lot* higher. This took me about two months of my spare time, maybe 100 hours.
But, for all I know, maybe MB already offers it in .pdf form.
Does anyone know if it is offered in *any* electronic form?
I just checked the file size of one of my digital army manuals. 241 pages was about 6.2 mb. Double that to rhe size of the mercedes manual and it should still only be about a 1000th of the size. Or something.like that. You have got.to change that formatting.
It's a tiny booklet with print about as fine as a Gideon Bible. I scanned it at 3485 x 2560 pixels (so, about half that as the actual page area) on my Canon MP210 multifunction, using XSane.
Especially for those of us who need reading glasses, even though not OCR'ed, using the alphabetical index and table of contents this scanned form is *tons* easier than leafing through the bound volume.
For example, this screen capture. No doubt at all of the numeric values, when you're looking at it on a 19-inch or larger monitor:
http://i43.tinypic.com/27wr447.png
If I were to OCR it, being a Linux guy, I'd probably use Tesseract compiled with Leptonica support under the OCRFeeder GUI. But if I had that much free time I'd probably be driving a Maybach.