I was looking at the online copy of the Bodleian manuscript of Plato, the “Clarkianus” 39 (here), when I discovered something wonderful. We can now download the whole thing as a PDF!
This is just so amazing! It also means that any cyber-attack can only do so much damage, if you have offline copies.
Here’s the screen grabs of what to do:
- Go to the manuscript online:
2. Click on the “Download” icon and you get this.
3. Click on the download for the whole item.
Note that if you select a page range, it has to assemble that offline and email you, so it takes longer.
That’s it! It’s actually the best user interface for downloads that I’ve yet seen. Nice!
The only downside is resolution. The download of this manuscript (871 pages) is a pretty massive 800mb. If you look at folio 1r, the scholia are a bit fuzzy. So for these you still need to use the website. It would be good to have an “ultra-high res, kiss your disk space goodbye” option. But it’s still a huge step forward.
This is very useful, thank you.
Apparently you can download high quality jpg files too using the dropdown arrow and selecting JPG (full). Then you get a link to a zip in your email. You have to make your own pdf though.
But the whole file would be huge. Each full size image from this ms. has 5428 x 7230 px and takes 10MB. Clearly they don’t want to keep an 8GB pdf file on their servers.
I did download one page and it was higher resolution. But gosh yes… 80Gb files are no joke… yet.