A while back in chat Zeon mentioned to me that manual scans would be nice. Have manual scans for the US games been scanned already somewhere? Would anyone find this useful? It would be a fair amount of work (and I would have to buy a scanner) so if I would be wasting my time please let me know.
Would anyone like to see it done?
A few years ago some dude (
I want to say "Validus" but I don't think that's correct. OK, his name was "avatarloki" and you could download the manuals at avatarloki.com) over at magicengine.com forums scanned nearly all the U.S. manuals.
I thought it was a great idea, especially because I had scanned ~40 manuals on my own before getting tired. I had intended on hosting all the manuals at my site, but then I moved on to other projects...
...we could simply find the avatarloki's stuff and make it available again (the were OK quality scans).
I think it would be great to have all the manuals available.
TANGENT: We could also be
crazy (I'm a perfectionist, at times). If you (we) did this, I would love to do it right:
A. Start from scratch. Create PDF's with high quality scans (Phase 1).
B. After getting that done, and making them available, I would like to embark on Phase 2: I have software that uses OCR to convert images to text, embeds the text, and then spits out a PDF. The original look and feel of the manual is untouched... AND...
Embedded text makes the PDF's searchable. I always thought this would be a wonderful resource (searchable scans), and I want to do this with my magazine scans as well. Of course, the OCR is not perfect and I have to manually fix any garbled nonsense generates.
Anyway, if you were willing to scan, I would be happy to help out with other stuff (hosting the files, working on OCR, designing a nice-looking page layout, etc. etc.)