De Re Atari - In Spanish!

[machf]

Continuing with other Atari 8-bit related things I've been up to lately...

 

So, in the late 1980s and early 1990s there were a couple local magazines called "Atari Creativo" (which never made it past issue #0, devoted exclusively to Atari computer, both 8-bit and ST family) and its successor "Informática Creativa" (which managed to release issues #0, #1 and #2, devoted to home computers in general). I first found out about Atari Creativo through a former schhoolmate (who unfortunately died tragically in 2002) who bought it at a newsstand downtown one day, and some months later my dad told me he heard an interview to the editor of Informática Creativa on the radio, which got me to look for it at newsstands and then subscribe to it. Aside from subscribing, I contributed some tips and BASIC programs for the magazine, and one of those days, at the editor's office, next to several Atari manuals and reference books, I noticed a ring-bound photocopy of De Re Atari in Spanish. Asking about it, it turned out someone else had asked him to photocopy his own copy and then never picked it up, so I asked him if he could sell it to me, and he agreed. I've had it on one of my bookshelves for several years, next to the issues of COMPUTE! magazine my former schoolmate gave me when he was getting rid of old stuff, some years before his death.

 

So, this week I picked it up to look at a few things, and I became curious whether it could be found online, seeing how the original De Re Atari is on the Internet Archive. But the only reference to a Spanish language version of the book I could find online was this entry in a blog:

 

http://manillismo.blogspot.com/2011/07/de-re-atari-en-castellano.html

 

So, I decided to go ahead and scan it and retouch it a bit. I started yesterday in the afternoon and finished by 4am, since it turned out to be 300 pages, including the covers. I've made a .ZIP file containing the imaes at 300dpi, which is 168MB big and can be viewed for example with SumatraPDF (or you could rename the extension to .cbz and use one of those comic book readers to view it). I also tried converting them to a .PDF file, but the resulting size was 175MB, so it wasn't really an improvement over the .ZIP file. I've thought of resampling the pages to half their current size (which should reduce the size of the resulting .ZIP file by 75%), but I'm afraid the results may become somewhat unreadable. Suggestions on this? And where could I upload the current file(s)?

 

Now, I don't know id this photocopy was made from an official translation or is an unofficial one; the issue shown in the picture on that blog has a different cover, and is clearly spiral-bound rather than ring-bound. The photocopy appears to have been made from an original (or maybe it's a photocopy of a photocopy) which was also spiral-bound (you can notice the holes on some misaligned pages). Also, though the photocopy is in A4 format, the original from which it was made appears to have been in Letter format, as some misaligned pages have had some text close to the margins almost chopped off, while the height appears to have been shorter. At some point, it had been divided into 3 volumes (my guess is that it may have been done due to the difficulty in finding a spiral or ring wide enough to hold 300 pages), with Volume 1 containing the Index, Preface and Chapters 1-6, Volume 2 containing Chapters 7-10, and Volume 3 containing the Appendices and the Glossary of Terms. BTW, it appears this translation was made from the "early versions" of the book which can be found here at the Internet Archive (hence the different number of chapters):

 

https://archive.org/details/DeReAtari_early_version

 

Maybe when they split it into 3 volumes, they changed the cover(s)... the one in the photocopy had a "VOL. 1" at the bottom which I removed after scanning it, hinting at the possibility that after they repacked the 3 volumes again into a single one, they just reused the cover from the first one for the whole. I also removed a stamp from a local computer store which was present on all pages belonging to Volumes 1 and 2 (but not on those corresponding to Volume 3, which again hints at the possibility of it having been split first and reunited again at a later time; aside from that, the pages from Volume 1 -which as I mentioned appear to have been originally of Letter size- appear to have been placed closer to the bottom of the A4 format while the ones from Volume to appear to have been placed closer to the top when being photocopied). And I had to recreate the last page from Chapter one, containing both images referenced in that chapter, since it was missing from the photocopy; I tried to use a font close enough to the original, but not quite identical, if you look closely you'll notice the differences. Also, the translation appears to have been typed maybe on a word processor on an Atari 8-bit and then printed on a dot-matrix printer, that's why I have my doubts about resampling the pages at a smaller size...

 

I'm attaching a few pages so that you can see what it is like (each image is 2480 pixels wide by 3508 pixels high, being A4 pages scanned at 300dpi)...

 

 

[+Allan]

Thank you for scanning this.

 

If you could scan it at 100% that would be great. It looks like you are scanning it at 300-400%. Most scanning software will have an option that says 'scan at actual size' or 'Auto' or they will actually give you a choice of percentage.

[machf]

I've never heard the term "%" used in relation to scans... the usual is to express the scan resolution in dpi (dots per inch), and 300dpi is pretty standard to get a good quality picture from the original; it can then be reprinted on a printer at the same resolution and look close enough to it. Lower resolutions can save space, but as I mentioned, particularly in this case, the results may become unreadable, which is why I haven't tried resampling it before asking for opinions first...

[explorer]

Thanks, Marco Antonio, for the scanning.

 

The "Comunidad Atari" Telegram group have a FTP for Atari docs, specially in spanish.

 

But I think the correct place would by archive.org and Atarimania.

 

 

[machf]

OK, so I've tried reasmpling the images at different resolutions... at 1240*1754 pixels (50% of the original  size, or 150dpi), the corresponding .ZIP file is 70MB; at 620*877 pixels (25% of the original, or 75dpi), it becomes 26MB, but the text, though still readable, has become blurry; at 823*1164 pixels (33.18% of the original, or 99.5dpi, that is ~100dpi), it becomes 40MB and it's still readable an clear. I think this last option may be the best compromise between size and quality.

 

Can you upload at archive.org anonymously?

[Mathy]

Hello Mario Antonio

 

Today, (byte wise) size doesn't really matter for those kind of things, but it would be nice if you could scan it as "Letter" and not "A4", to keep it looking like the original did.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

PS welcome back!

 

[ascrnet]

What is known to be a third party translation. In my country there were always comments of this book in Spanish and also the Mapping.

 

I hope you share it to make an OCR process and generate a new version with all its parts together. ?

[machf]

2 hours ago, Mathy said:

Hello Mario Antonio

 

Today, (byte wise) size doesn't really matter for those kind of things, but it would be nice if you could scan it as "Letter" and not "A4", to keep it looking like the original did.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

PS welcome back!

 

Hello Mathy! Your name sure rings a bell, even after all these years...

 

Unfortunately, the size was already chopped (at least, width-wise) when they photocopied it... so it would be hard to "recover" the original format. If anyone over here wants to do it (by trimming the pages heightwise and padding them widthwise), you're welcome.

 

So, if size is no concern, is it OK to attach it right here, then?

Edited June 3, 2022 by machf
Some typos corrected

[machf]

Just tried uploading the 40MB .ZIP here, but the upload failed (got a "-200" message). Anyway, time to walk my dog, she's about to drag me outside by a leg if I keep her waiting...

Edited June 3, 2022 by machf

[machf]

Well, I've temporarily uploaded both the 100dpi and the 300dpi .ZIP files to my Google Drive, until someone gives them a better home. The smaller one is meant for regular users, and the larger one for anyone interested in OCRing the images or otherwise editing them.

 

Link to the 100dpi version (40MB):

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wq2XF13fK1-pqq5Dr9FZWRT8_hc9iGfA/view?usp=sharing
 

Link to the 300dpi version (168MB):

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BIAn7g6sa5VaCQkIE4ALGg3sUJ7sUI_g/view?usp=sharing
 

I'm wondering whether or not it's worth to also upload the .PDF versions made from those files... (41MB and 175MB, respectively)

 

 

[+Allan]

I put it all in a PDF and uploaded it to Archive.org. 

 

https://archive.org/details/de-re-atari-spanish

 

It will take a bit for Archive.org to make it viewable but you can download it now under 'Download Options'.

[+Allan]

7 hours ago, machf said:

Well, I've temporarily uploaded both the 100dpi and the 300dpi .ZIP files to my Google Drive, until someone gives them a better home. The smaller one is meant for regular users, and the larger one for anyone interested in OCRing the images or otherwise editing them.

 

Link to the 100dpi version (40MB):

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wq2XF13fK1-pqq5Dr9FZWRT8_hc9iGfA/view?usp=sharing
 

Link to the 300dpi version (168MB):

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BIAn7g6sa5VaCQkIE4ALGg3sUJ7sUI_g/view?usp=sharing
 

I'm wondering whether or not it's worth to also upload the .PDF versions made from those files... (41MB and 175MB, respectively)

 

 

machf, thank you again for scanning this. If you do scan anything else, please use a non-compression file format like Tif. I did the best I could with the PDF but it is a somewhat blurry because of the jpeg compression.

[machf]

Usually I keep a copy of any scans in PNG format, but this one being 300 pages long scared me away... right now I'm a bit short on the side of free space on my PC's HDD. I need to start burning stuff to optical discs for backup soon.