This is the only blog that I have ever contributed to. But some of my interests are outside the scope of Thoughts on Antiquity. So I thought that I might try starting my own blog, and see if anyone is interested in what I have to say. I shall continue to blog here from time to time as well, however.
Month: August 2008
Pages from my journal
Welcome to this new blog. This is intended as a continuation of my posts at Thoughts on Antiquity, where I will still continue to blog. However I feel that there is a need for somewhere that I can use to post announcements of what I am doing or material that I have uploaded, which perhaps would not fit well at that address. I’m still maintaining “What’s new” pages at several points on my web site, and perhaps that isn’t the best way to do things.
So it’s an experiment. It will work if I find it useful, and if you find it interesting. The outlook will be very much the same; material about antiquity.
I’m not entirely happy with this WordPress theme — let me know what you think.
A passage from Evagrius Scholasticus
From book 3, chapter 32, slightly modernised:
“THERE were other things which caused secret vexation to [the emperor] Anastasius. For when Ariadne wanted to invest him with the purple, Euphemius, who held the archiepiscopal see, withheld his approval. He agreed only when Anastasius presented to him an agreement, written in his own hand, and secured with fearful oaths. This promised that he would maintain the faith inviolate, and would introduce no innovations into the holy church of God, if he obtained the sceptre. This document he also deposited with Macedonius, the keeper of the sacred treasures. He adopted this measure because Anastasius had generally the reputation of holding the Manichaean doctrine.
When, however, Macedonius ascended the episcopal throne, Anastasius wanted the agreement returned to him, affirming that it was an insult to the imperial dignity, if the before-mentioned document, in his own hand-writing, should be preserved. When Macedonius resolutely opposed the demand, and firmly protested that he would not betray the faith, the emperor pursued every insidious device for the purpose of ejecting him from his see.
Accordingly, even boys were brought forward as informers, who falsely accused both themselves and Macedonius of infamous practices. But when Macedonius was found to be emasculate, they had recourse to other contrivances. In the end, by the advice of Celer, commander of the household troops, Macedonius secretly retired from his see.”
This writer is hostile to Anastasius. But the kinds of allegations levelled by the cynical against priests to discredit their moral authority do not change, it seems.
In the Eastern Roman civil service, certain posts were reserved for eunuchs. Macedonius’ parents had designed him for such a career, thereby giving him an unusual advantage in such infighting. But don’t some of the canons of the ecumenical prohibit eunuchs from being priests?
Using Lulu.com to get copies of books
Once I got interested in Arabic Christian Literature, I quickly found that the only book of use was Georg Graf’s 5 volume Geschichte der arabischen christlichen Literatur, published 50 years ago by the Vatican library. I was able to buy volumes 2-5 online, but not volume 1. The first two volumes deal with literature up to 1500, so are really the only part that would interest readers of this blog.
In this post, I mentioned that I intended to try using the print-on-demand service, lulu.com, to make a personal copy of volume 1. Indeed I did so, and perhaps my experience will be of use to others.
My first step was to borrow the book from the library, and run it through a scanner to create a directory of images, one per page. This took quite a while, because it’s 700-odd pages! I used Finereader 8.0 OCR software, not to do OCR but simply to manage the scanning. I used an OpticBook 3600 book scanner (very cheap and very fast) to scan each page.
In FineReader you can crop the pages to the same size, and erase dots etc. I did this, producing images with only small margins. You can also export all the pages to create an image-only PDF, and so I did, getting a 50mb PDF.
At this point I got rather ahead of myself, and omitted a crucial step, but I found this out later.
I opened an account on lulu.com (which is free), and started to create a book. To do this, you choose a paper size and binding. In my case this was 7.44″ x 9.68″, perfect binding. The site prompts you to upload a PDF, which is pretty awkward and fails a lot. I found that I had to follow the alternative path given on the site ‘for large files’ and upload my PDF using FTP.
When I had uploaded it, the site warned me that my PDF pages were smaller than the paper size. This meant that it would resize them. Foolish chap that I was, I presumed they would add white space. But this was wrong… they stretched the pages. They were still readable, but looked a bit odd.
You’re also asked whether your book should be made available to the public for sale (with whatever markup on cost you choose); only available on a private URL; or only available to you. I chose the latter, in case there were copyright issues.
The site allows you to design your own cover — I did this in a basic way. You then get to see the PDF that results from all of this, which they send to a printer. You save, and that’s it. A link appears, offering you the chance to buy a copy yourself, which I did. For this volume the cost price was about $22, and the postage was extra of course. Manufacture of the book takes 3-5 days, and then the post office do their thing for however long they like.
In my case it was three weeks before it arrived. It looked perfectly acceptable; except for the slightly stretched letters.
What I should have done, after scanning the images and cleaning and cropping them, was to pad them with whitespace myself before making the PDF. This is something that Finereader doesn’t let you do. But it stores the images in .tif format, so you can use other tools on them.
Since there were 700-odd files, I wasn’t going to do this by hand! I used a free command-line tool called ImageMagick. I don’t know it well, but it did the trick. I found that I needed an up-to-date version.
Now the TIF files from Finereader all include a thumbnail. This makes them hard to work with. What I did was write a little .com file containing a series of commands:
convert 0001.tif 0001.png convert 0002.tif 0002.png convert 0003.tif 0003.png ...
This gave errors, but converted all the pages to png format. I had to do this, because the next step wouldn’t work if I did it on the TIF files directly.
I then wrote another batch file:
convert 0001-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872 0001-ok.png convert 0002-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872 0002-ok.png convert 0003-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872 0003-ok.png ...
This took all the pages and plonked each of them in the middle of a white background sized 2978 by 3872 pixels. I knew that this was the size of the pages in the ‘print ready’ PDF that lulu.com had generated (because I downloaded it, opened it in Finereader, and got the size of the image of page 1 in pixels).
Then I created a new Finereader project, read in all those PNG’s at one go, saved them as a PDF, and this time had a PDF which was of the correct dimensions.
I’ve just finished uploading that, and bought a new copy of it. It ought to be perfect.
The PDF’s that we find on archive.org and the like are generally of low resolution, so I don’t know if they could be used for this. I scanned Graf at 400 dpi; the PDF of Agapius that I have been looking at on archive.org was 200 dpi. So we may all have to scan our own books.
But this clearly works. If you need a copy of an out-of-print and unobtainable book for private research purposes, you don’t have to rely on a pile of photocopies. We all have piles and piles of those, I know! But no; scan them instead, save your floor space, and print them at lulu.com. You could even produce compilations in this way. You could print extracts, ring bound, with blank pages between each opening. All sorts of things are possible.
Of course if you made them available to anyone else, you would need to be sure that they were out of copyright. If it is in print, buy a proper copy. But if it’s a 19th century library catalogue, this is probably a nice way to get your own copy.
8th August 2008: the printed copy arrived, and it’s perfect!