Manuals

[mos6507]

Some advice on the manual archive...

 

Rather than doing all out scans of the entire pages, you could:

 

1) Lay it out in HTML with the diagrams and pictures being the only images, not the text. This can look very nice if you use CSS to try to approximate the fonts and colors of the original manuals!!

 

The problem there is that it's hard to use exotic fonts because there is still no real downloadable font standard for CSS...

 

2) Another alternative is to cut and paste from the HTML/Text manual archive into FLASH. The advantage there is that any fonts you use will stay WYSIWYG because they are embedded in the Flash, and you have all the advantages of interactivity...

 

The downside is that you wind up having to download all the embedded images all at once in the SWF (assuming that you don't store multiple pages as separate SWFs.)

 

3) If you go for fullpage scans, you should convert to PDF because the online PDF viewers have their own way of streaming in the data only as it needs it. Seems to work okay but it's still slow.

[hurt]

that and some of us hate flash and still use text only browsers for speed (even though we have a cable connection). jpegs and pngs are also way more cross platform that anything else.

[Alex]

Ack, Flash! While it has its place, I don't like it for most applications. It's currently a thorn in my side because I can't for the life of me get it to install on my laptop. I've never had a problem before, but I simply cannot install it. I've been unable to access quite a few web sites because they don't provide an alternative form of navigation. It's very frustrating, and I've certainly learned the lesson of using Flash only as an enhancement and never rely on it. And some people just plain don't like it and don't install it.

 

I would agree with Pitfall Harry's comments for the most part. We considered the same ideas that Glenn suggested actually, and settled on scans for accuracy, compatibility, and that good old warm feeling look at a real (digital) manual.

[Albert]

Just wanted to get my two cents in on this issue as well. I much prefer straight manual scans versus HTML, PDF and Flash. With the sheer number of 2600 manuals Alex and I are going to scan, it's going to take a considerable amount of time as it is. Converting these images to some other format would add additional time to this process, and in the case of converting to HTML, considerable time.

 

Also, I prefer to see the original manuals rather than some other respresentation of them (as would be the case with Flash or HTML). Plus as Hurt pointed out, JPG images are pretty standard across systems so just about everyone should be able to view them. Yes, the same is true with HTML, but with HTML the images could potentially look different in different browsers and systems.

 

Once I move to Austin this or next month and I'm hosting the site myself we'll be able to start scanning manuals en masse.

 

..Al

[mos6507]

But if you use scans you gain in accuracy but you give up the ability for low bandwidth users to view the online archive in an interactive way. They pretty much have to download the manual and view it offline because it's so sluggish to download.

 

If you up the compression ratio on the JPGs it is going to MANGLE the text. You have to scan at a pretty high resolution to begin with just to resolve the text.

 

I would at least go with PDF.

 

As for the accuracy issue, the same problem applies to the game library database. It's always in a state of evolution.

 

My own experience in this: I converted Missile Command over to HTML with image cutups and I thought it looked great and it downloaded fast AND with bookmarks on the table of contents it was really easy to random-access navigate through the sections.

 

I do agree that the existing manual archive is full of typos. You have to proofread them against the original manual.

[Albert]

Hi Glenn,

 

I can certainly sympathize with low-bandwidth users. When I was in Vegas for CGE and in Austin last week I wasn't terribly enjoying the site when dialing in with a slow 26K connection. When we made the decision to put up scans of boxes, carts, and manuals while we were designing AtariAge we knew we'd probably alienate some modem users. As time goes on hopefully more people will have access and be able to afford higher-bandwidth solutions and this will become less of an issue.

 

We do intend to keep the 2600 HTML archive online, which is fairly comprehensive at this point (in fact, I need to add Wing War today, typed in by Pitfall Harry). We'll make it easier for people to choose to view either the scans or HTML versions of the same manual, when we have both.

 

One of the largest drawbacks of using scans is they cannot be searched by the site's global search engine (which we've yet to implement). I'm personally not crazy about using PDF files as you're adding another software layer where your main benefit would be the streaming you talked about. Since you can only see one manual page at a time (not including the page that displays thumbs), you only load one page anyway so this would seem to negate PDF's benefit in this regard. Now, if PDF would cache ahead pages while you're looking at the current page, that would be nice. But the PDF viewer would break up the page or require that the page be viewed in a separate window. This makes navigation more of a problem and also it's also more difficult to manage people linking in from the site externally (we like having the ability to link straight into any page of a manual, something that can't be done with PDFs).

 

As for compression of JPEG images, you're right, it's a fine line between keeping them small and keeping them legible. We've leaned on the side of having reasonably clean images, although that costs us in terms of bandwidth and disk storage (both of which are serious problems for us at the moment and won't go away until we run the site on our own server).

 

I want you to know that I'm not blowing off your suggestions. We discussed this at length when working on the new site and decided the pros of manual scans outweighed the cons. We also decided to keep the HTML archive, although we probably won't actively create new content for it. However, if others want to submit new HTML manuals we'll gladly add them as before. This will mostly affect the manuals for the 5200, 7800, Jaguar, Lynx and any future system we support, as we have *no* HTML manual archives for them. Although I've seen HTML manuals on the web for 5200 and 7800 games, so we might be able to acquire them easily.

 

Take care,

 

..Al

[mos6507]

I'd be interested in submitting HTML manuals with the cutups, at least a few of them, just to show what they can look like.