brainwagon

I’ve scanned and created another document, an article from the Gleanings for the ATM column that ran for years in the magazine Sky and Telescope. This article is by Dick Buchroeder and discusses the plans for a Catadioptric Herschelian Telescope, an interesting telescope design with tilted optics.

If you aren’t interested in telescope making, you might be interested in looking at the quality of the output images anyway. For the majority of the text (all but the first cover page), I just used the Any2Djvu server, but I goofed around a bit with the cover image (the color scan of the cover for the Sky & Telescope). I took the color scan, converted it to a grayscale map, and then thresholded it to produce a binary image that contained the text and some cruft from the cover image of the two watches. If you try to use the cjb2 compressor on this image, you don’t get very good results, but if you paint out the crud, and then use the djvumake program, you can get a very nice image, and one that is entirely comparable in size to the output of the dedicated server.

I’ll probably write up a simple guide on how to do this later, and see if I can
get it posted someplace where more people will see it and hopefully use it.