QL User Guide new scan

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greenscreen
ROM Dongle
Posts: 6
Joined: Wed May 12, 2021 7:55 pm

QL User Guide new scan

Post by greenscreen »

I've done a big clean up of the "Sinclair QL User Guide". It's a complete facsimile version without OCR as I wanted the printed manual in as good quality as possible. I've pointed dilwyn to it so it can go on his website.

Here it is https://archive.org/details/sinclair-ql-user-guide


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dilwyn
Mr QL
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Joined: Wed Dec 01, 2010 10:39 pm

Re: QL User Guide new scan

Post by dilwyn »

Always nice to see people put in the time and effort to preserve and improve important documents like this.

I've downloaded a copy to add to my website (will link to the original too in case of future updates). It's a 133 MB long and took absolutely ages to download from archive.org - I'll have a play with something like PDF24 to see if it can be compressed to a smaller size without too much loss of quality. Meanwhile, it'll be available via http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/manuals/index.html if and when my broadband manages to upload it successfully... :roll:

There is an improved version of the QL user guide on my site as both an online html version and as PDFs and other eBook formats, but split into smaller and separate Introduction / Beginners Guide / Concepts /Keywords sections in A4 and A5 layouts on the eBooks page at http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/ebooks/index.html - but this version has the advantage of being all in one.

EDIT: PDF24 couldn't compress it any further without a lot of loss of quality, so I gave up on that one. Also, while uploading, I realised that many of the shortcut links at the top of the Replacement Manuals page were broken, so I fixed those. The QL Manual files can now be accessed directly at http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/manuals/in ... l#qlmanual


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bwinkel67
QL Wafer Drive
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Joined: Thu Oct 03, 2019 2:09 am

Re: QL User Guide new scan

Post by bwinkel67 »

Wow, thanks for doing that!


Derek_Stewart
Font of All Knowledge
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Joined: Mon Dec 20, 2010 11:40 am
Location: Sunny Runcorn, Cheshire, UK

Re: QL User Guide new scan

Post by Derek_Stewart »

Hi,

The sxan file is very nicely scanned, just needs a little cleaning up and OCRed correctly. I have some nice OCR.software that can do the work.


Regards,

Derek
greenscreen
ROM Dongle
Posts: 6
Joined: Wed May 12, 2021 7:55 pm

Re: QL User Guide new scan

Post by greenscreen »

I've done a huge amount of cleaning up already. The source scan was 30Gig in size. The archive.org did an automatic OCR on it already which is not bad.


Derek_Stewart
Font of All Knowledge
Posts: 3929
Joined: Mon Dec 20, 2010 11:40 am
Location: Sunny Runcorn, Cheshire, UK

Re: QL User Guide new scan

Post by Derek_Stewart »

greenscreen wrote:I've done a huge amount of cleaning up already. The source scan was 30Gig in size. The archive.org did an automatic OCR on it already which is not bad.
Hi,

Sorry, I downloaded the PDF version without the text layer.

I tend to convert all the QL manual I need to read, which is probably all of them, to Epub format and read on a tablet. BUt Caibre does a good job with the PDF to Epub. Also the Calibre Ebook editor is getting good as well, for some minor alternations.

Pity, I can not read the Epub files on the QL, which only seems to be the file name lengths, as the Epub format is a ZIP file container with HTML files with CSS control files.

Maybe a personal wishlist.


Regards,

Derek
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