Valve Data Reference Book - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 10, 2015, 11:50:33 am
content: I have an old reference book titled Radio Valve Data 7th Edition dated 1964, 150 or so pages, paperback by Iliffe Books LtdDoes anyone know if this book has been archived on the interwebs somewhere, if it has then i can add it to paper recycling otherwise if there is useful information contained within it could be given to someone to scan and archive?

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2015, 12:14:25 pm
content: Apparently, despite "over 310,000 copies sold", no one has put up a digitised version. The problem with databooks is that (at least for the IC ones in my experience) while most of the data in them is widely available, it's the data on those few parts that don't show up in earlier or later versions or anywhere else which is most valuable.I suggest uploading it to archive.org - they have some valve databookslike this oneandthis onealready.With high-res digital cameras available cheaply these days, you don't necessarily need a scanner anymore...

author: JacquesBBB
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2015, 12:53:13 pm
content: If you are willing to mail it to me,As I have a fast scanner at work, I am willing to scan it and upload it to an archive.Jacques

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 10, 2015, 12:59:08 pm
content: Quote from: JacquesBBB on May 10, 2015, 12:53:13 pmthat would be perfectit's not likely i would be able to find the time to do it.PM me your address and i'll post it to you

author: JacquesBBB
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2015, 01:04:22 pm
content: DoneI will post a message on this thread when it will be uploaded.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 11, 2015, 07:32:12 am
content: FYI;http://www.mif.pg.gda.pl/homepages/frank/more.htmlthere are other archives out there, of course.Tim

author: woodchips
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 12, 2015, 09:00:12 pm
content: The Avo valve tester data manuals are available for download if interested.

author: JacquesBBB
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 17, 2015, 11:22:27 am
content: Quote from: dexters_lab on May 10, 2015, 12:59:08 pmI have properly received the volume. Will scan it as soon as possible.Jacques

author: JacquesBBB
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 15, 2016, 05:30:26 pm
content: As soon as possible was a little bit longer than expected,but the volume is here (Radio Valve Data 7th Edition dated 1964)https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bw_PaC_rlfjpSngyeDk3YUtuVmc

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 15, 2016, 06:35:37 pm
content: Thank you Jacques for taking the time to do this, hopefully it will be useful to someone!

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 16, 2016, 09:04:32 am
content: Quote from: JacquesBBB on September 15, 2016, 05:30:26 pmJacques, thanks for that.Now you've scanned it, what do you wish to do with the physical copy?If you don't want to keep it, if I pay postage, can you post it to me? I can pay for the book too, but not much.Reason: I have an interest in the various methods of digital capture and representation of books, and that one is a rich example of both good and bad features of PDF. Having a close look at that pdf is rewarding, and I'd like to have the physical book as a reference. For a background writing project 'on scanning' of mine.It would be good to know details of your scanning system too. What machine, what settings used, how long it took you, what post processing (if any) you did, and so on.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 16, 2016, 11:25:12 am
content: This should be the direct link:https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&confirm=Fn75&id=0Bw_PaC_rlfjpSngyeDk3YUtuVmcIs anyone willing to upload it to archive.org? I'd do it but I'm on a rather slow connection at the moment...

author: JoeO
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 16, 2016, 01:19:05 pm
content: Here is a better scan of the seventh edition. If you follow this link, you will lose hours if not days out of your life. Trust me because it happened to me.The link is down the page on the left side.http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Wireless_World_Magazine.htm

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 17, 2016, 12:47:06 am
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on September 16, 2016, 09:04:32 amWell, I'd like to submit this PDF for your approvalhttp://bama.edebris.com/manuals/tek/1s1/"Someone" went through some trouble to make this one.Took me weeks, I scanned each page up to three times; OCR, line drawings and photographs, for each photo I took histograms to try to get the most out of the pictures. I stitched the 11x17 schematics back together after scanning in two sections. I used some RIP and color reduction to get back the black and blue drawings, and then painstakingly stitched them back with the tiny little window the included software offered me.Luckily Tek manuals are spiral bound, or rather those comb things. I scanned in a page at a time, then bought a new comb as the old one just snapped off tooth by tooth.I put it all back together with Word... I tried to keep it as close as possible to the original. There are some spots where I just lost patience with Word's finickiness and the graphics don't quite line up.I created the cover with a high-resolution scan of the Tek logo and a kind of texture that looks like the real cover material.What do you think?I might do the same thing for my 1968 "Microelectronics packaging" book by Sideris. It's a treasure trove of "how they did it" on early IC work. I wouldn't use Word again...

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 17, 2016, 05:56:41 am
content: Quote from: Alex Eisenhut on September 17, 2016, 12:47:06 amFirstly, I don't ever want to sound like I'm criticizing the efforts of people who put a lot of work into scanning old books to preserve them. Especially not forum members. The direction I'm coming from is that the available technology has a lot of weaknesses, and I'm trying to build a reference manual to help people get the best result for their effort. Especially since many well-meaning people are not experts in all the relevant stages of the workflow to produce good quality electronic documents (and neither am I.) Not to mention that some of the tools needed are not freely available. And some of the flaws I criticize in many works I see are things I don't yet have a solution workflow/toolset for myself. (eg mixed screened image and sharp text/line overlays.)I also don't want to get into the business of being asked to judge stuff like this. But since you asked... some thoughts as I read through the PDF. (I've temporarily misplaced my djvu reader, doh. So can't see that file just now.)It's a PDF. Won't go into the merits/flaws of PDF here, and it's great you provided an alternative.The cover. Nice and clean. You get the concept of removing superfluous background detail since it bloats file size. But... there are a few places where 'visual reality' has historical value, and the cover is one of them. You've routinely OCR'd all text, cover included. Result is the cover titles look too sharp and there's no sense of how they really looked. I'd have reduced the background to something like yours, but kept the title text as true image. Also kept some or all of the comb binder. So the cover at least still looks like the actual book. In 100 years, no one alive will remember what these really looked like.When some particular element has detail you consider important (as you recognize for the cover texture) it's worth allocating some more filesize to it. Because you substituted a background, the Tek silver logo now looks like a sharp-edged insert (because it is.) Might have been better to do the cover as a high-res scan, then scale the whole thing to the wanted size. Up to you whether that includes the cover texture dots, but the scaling will keep the text and logo edges looking real.In general I'm wary of fully OCR-converted text, since it's notoriously error-prone, and there's no fallback to the original image. One can't trust it as a historical reference. But there isn't any good format I'm aware of that bundles both the original page image plus the OCR text, with full word by word linkage.First few pages with grayscale photos and text. Nice job removing the screening pattern without moire.The Warranty and Contents images have a different shade balance to the pic of the unit though. I don't have that manual so don't know how it is really, but I think maybe you used different processing on them. It's important to experiment, find a processing recipe that works for all the images in a book (or sets of similar), then stick to that exactly during the workflow. To avoid this kind of uncertainty of whether the images were or weren't actually different looking.That the main Contents page is a static image, that doesn't work as real clickable items to get to book sections, is a flaw with the PDF tools. Other methods can do it, like html image hot areas, etc. So can PDF with authoring tools. Yeah I know, after spending many days scanning and cleaning, making a working index is a pain. But its lack is also going to be a pain for everyone using the ebook, forever.The main text OCR is very nicely done. Superscripts, fonts, etc correct. So nice I suspect you did a lot of manual cleanup? Since the text is totally abstracted, there's no paper and ink blemishes at all. Skimming, didn't spot any obvious OCR-errors. Even the equations are perfect. Did you manually proofread or hand-layout the entire thing? Vastly better than most OCR efforts.Included 'Notes' pages. Yay! Visual veracity ftw.Page 2.2 pic of the unit is again different tonal quality to the earlier one. Also there is some bleedthrough of paper other side text. Hint: to avoid that, use a matt black backing sheet when scanning. Black felt works well.Page 2-5, 6-2, etc line drawings are half-toned, ie fax mode. The edge jagginess even at normal zoom is noticeable. In zoom it's nasty. Better way to do these is scan in 256 level gray, then adjust color curve to get saturated black and white, but preserve gray scale on edges. Clean any remaining image blemishes, then scale to final size, then reduce number of PNG bits/pixel to minimum that preserves visual line edge shading to look clean. With a clean white background, coding as PNG with these steps achieves surprisingly small filesize.This goes for all the subsequent B&W line drawing inserts. Worst case: waveforms on 2.22 _really_ missing gray scale.Page 2-15 table. Yeow, you did that by hand in MS Word? Lots of work I expect, but... the vertical alignment of text vs the bars is broken. So is text v-alignment in boxes. Not your fault, I know it's the tools. Which is the kind of thing that pisses me off - a utility to do this right should start with the base scanned image, and allow OCR and auto-aligning of the abstracted text with the original text elements. Sigh. I'm sure it was correct in the paper book. So this kind of visually awful result makes the original layout artists and typesetters look bad.Page 4-2, 4-7, etc. The dreaded problem: text and line drawing combined with screened shading. You can't blur the shading adequately to get rid of the screening pattern and posterize without moire, while avoiding ruining the crisp line edges of the illustration & text. I'm still looking for a descreening utility that deals with this properly. Got one that's _almost_ there. It uses Fourier analysis to identify the screened areas. But then insists on doing the descreen itself, instead of just passing a mask to photoshop to allow manual tweeking as required. Needs more work.Anyway, your image has background moire patterning (wasting file size) but it's not your fault.All the PCB/guts photos eg pg 4-4 - pretty good, nice tonal range and clean. I'd have adjusted for clean white backgrounds and PNG-coded to avoid JPG artefacts (zoom on blank areas to see what I mean.) Also for PNG-grayscale you can choose the number of bits per pixel, and much less than 8 is often perfectly adequate. Tradeoff between visible posterization of shaded areas, and filesize. PNG doesn't suffer from the artefacting JPG does, but being non-lossy, decent filesize is dependent on your pre-processing to remove superfluous noise in blank image areas.Block diagram - nice, perfectly aligned. Same comments about fax mode vs keeping some gray on edges.'Voltage and waveform test conditions' - in blue. Cool! But I'll be super picky: it's a different blue to that on the schematics, and I'm sure in the book it's the same ink.Schematics: Yay for generous resolution to keep all annotations easily readable.Same comment about 2-tone jaggies. Interesting though - the blue color means it actually has 3 colors - wht, blk, blu. Pity the pic is PDF-embedded. I'm curious to see how it's coded, and later I'll extract it with photoshop to have a look. Not that I'll find out how it's coded internally in the pdf.Many of the schematic sheets are quite skew - did you stitch and still forget to deskew? Or was that missing in your tools? What were you using to stitch? I can't see the join, so it worked well. But "small window"? What?Finally: This wall of text doesn't mean I think your Tek1S1 etext was bad. Your PDF is actually one of the best I've seen. I'm just a picky perfectionist and think these old manuals deserve a much better preservation in perpetuity than our current software tools and document formats allow.Also I suppose that my mum being a commercial artist, and my assisting her in the past with software book layout issues, contributed to my dissatisfaction factor with most technical etexts.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 18, 2016, 08:39:15 pm
content: I still have both the printed manual and the work files, so I suppose I could go in there and tweak it. I've noticed some aggravating typos.But besides Word or Libre Office/whatever Writer, what do people use to do page layouts like this?

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 18, 2016, 10:21:30 pm
content: Quote from: Alex Eisenhut on September 18, 2016, 08:39:15 pmI don't use any. My view is that current file format standards are not up to the needs of wrapping both the original page image (for historical and visual accuracy, proof of detail, etc) and the abstracted text (for search and copy accessibility) simultaneously with flexible interaction between the two. So when I scan documents the end result is a series of page images, structured in html for indexing, then bundled as a RAR-book for presentation. (And to avoid proprietary and closed documentation file formats like PDF. 'Closed' in the sense that you have to be rich to afford the specs docs, and then they probably aren't really complete anyway.)This way when the software technology eventually evolves to a level I consider adequate, the work can be OCR-d and repackaged then. Till that time, preserving the original appearance as accurately as possible is my priority. And even that, which you'd think would be easy, isn't, due to gaps in the scanning & post-processing software tools.It's really sad to see huge efforts like Project Guttenburg:https://www.gutenberg.org/http://gutenberg.net.au/where all that work ends up as completely abstracted texts with all trace of the original work's appearance lost. Not to mention the plague of typos introduced, and loss of typesetting nuances that were vital artistic elements of the work.The most painful thing is to see people destroying (cutting apart) old books to scan and OCR, and/or throwing away the physical book 'because it's no longer needed'. When the etext they produced is actually a pile of errors and retains little or no trace of the original visual and tactile spirit of the work. I consider this a kind of insane vandalism, rooted in ignorance, hubris and stupidity. This era, when so many physical books are being destroyed in the belief 'they are digitally captured' when they actually are not, is going to be hated by future generations.Btw, about deskewing line drawings such as schematics: this MUST be done in fully encoded individual pixel formats like 24 bit RGB, or 8 bit grayscale. If you try doing it in any indexed color coding system, the lines inevitably become jaggy due to inability to assign correctly weighted pixel shadings along edges.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 19, 2016, 03:54:28 am
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on September 18, 2016, 10:21:30 pmNeat fact, or, more precisely:Conventional scaling algorithms(such as hq2x/3x) only look at a small region of pixels, therefore they can only anticipate so many slopes of line. Now, these are upscaling methods, not antialiasing, but they are filtering methods all the same. There is, in some sense, an underlying image hidden behind the pixels; the challenge is to choose the right combination of pixels to best represent it.An example might be, taking a thresholded line drawing, blowing it up (perhaps using one of these methods) -- thus getting a high resolution antialiased image to work on -- and deskewing that. But because the algorithm only looks at a limited region per pixel, it can't correctly convert line segments longer than the width of that region. So you get jagged, steppy, bent lines -- even before deskewing. (If the deskew transform, itself, is nearest-neighbor rather than filtered, lines will be doubly jaggy. Even worse!)Tim

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 19, 2016, 04:32:15 am
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on September 17, 2016, 05:56:41 amWhile I am not as pedantic as you about retaining the look and feel of the original document, I applaud this coherent and thoughtful approach to document preservation.Clearly file formats exist which meet your requirement for storing OCR'd text along with the original image. The evidence is in the OCR programs which allow you to store work in progress, and which when editing or questioning a word in the OCR text bring up the image of the original text for the authers aid in interpretation. These formats are to my knowledge all proprietary, but at least are proofs by existence. I have found the public domain OCR programs sadly lacking, but maybe one of them does this, and would be the start of an open source file format with the characteristics you are looking for.