classicamiga magazine archive

[AlexJ]

The magazines will be available as PDF downloads, created by scanning the complete magazine in page by page, and including every page to preserve the complete publication as it was originally printed. This will therefore include all adverts as well as content.

Also some of the adverts will have a second use on the games section of the site.

[Harrison]

Yes I thought of that too.

Also what do you all think we should do with the game reviews in each magazine? I want to somehow link them into the actual game entries on the site. We could just include a section on each game page where we list the magazines that reviewed the game, and include the issue it was in and the page number, along with the score given. Or we could take it further and also actually have the review pages linked as images in addition to being in the complete magazine PDFs.

What is everyone's thoughts about this? Obviously doing this would increase the amount of work on the site, but when someone scans in a magazine they could add the reviews to the games as they go, so it wouldn't be quite as bad.

[Teho]

This is a nice idea. I think a "reviewed by" section listing the magazine issues and the score would be good, with the magazine name and issue number linking to the PDF download. Or the relevant issue's info page if there is going to be one for each issue.

[AlexJ]

What about a pdf file for each game containing all the reviews of that game? Would involve a bit of work cutting pages out of the main PDF files but would be cool to have all reviews for a particular game available in one go.

[Harrison]

That is quite a good idea too. Not sure which would be the best approach now.

So far we have the following options:

• List the magazines with the reviews in and link to their magazine page for downloading of the full mag PDF.
• List the magazines and link to each of the review pages from the magazines directly.
• List the magazines and host a PDF with a collection of all reviews in one.

The problem with the last option is that if new reviews for a game were added later the PDF would then need to be recreated. Whereas if just the pages from each issue were included as links more reviews could be added much more easily at a later date.

[burns flipper]

Have we got anyfurther onthesedecisions yet? Is there a guide available for all the standards i.e. what dpi etc to scan at?

[Harrison]

We haven't really got any further with the magazine section because of all the work needed for the game and demo sections so far. But it will eventually happen.

As for scanning. 150-300dpi is the resolution and the dimensions of each page should be at least 1500 wide. This then gives more than enough detail for cleaning them up before scaling them down for the final PDF.