Back issues of Model Railroading, RMJ & PRN now online

Unfortunately each issue is being put up as a bunch of individual page scans, which makes for a LOT of downloading and saving to get the full issues. While I applaud them for all of their extensive work in doing this, it would be nice if the scans were combined as a PDF for each issue.

Which is real easy to do with decent scan software. My combo machine came with software that will do this automatically.

And I could load all of the pages of an issue one by one into Open Office Writer and then do a PDF export, but it's still a lot of work to download all of the scans and do that. Again, not trying to denigrate the wonderful service they are providing for us.

Noted - but - each scan is on the order of 256k bytes. An 88 page issue would be over 23mB - do you really want to have to do a 23mB download if you're only interested in a page or two?

The scans are *.jpgs, and pretty small ones at that. I would prefer PDFs, but still, as a reference source, the collection is pretty good.

Wolf K.

They are indeed jpg images. I downloaded some, and they vary in size from

- I guess the best of both worlds would be to make it available either way.

I lean towards wanting the entire mag and not just the articles or plans that interest me at any given moment. Especially since my interests could change and what doesn't interest me now may interest me later but the resource here might be gone by that time. And like old Walthers catalogs, even the pages of just ads might be of interest for historical reference.

You can always download everything that's there. wget -r will do the job if you're running Linux - for others I can't say, but there should be a similar utility.

Easier:

Copy them all into one directory and make sure, the file names allow listing them in the correct order (e.g. pg001.pdf, pg002.pdf..)

Then open a terminal ("cmd" on windos systems) and navigate to the directory ("cd mr_01_01").

Type the following:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH pg*.pdf

You'll find the file out.pdf which contains all pages (pg*.pdf) in that directory after a minute or so.

Much faster than using any GUI program ;-)

Yes.

Have fun.

ray wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net:

Yes it is free, so accept it as is. I for one am only interested in specific articles and to have to D/L a whole issue for just a single article is a waste of bandwidth. Besides, I am not interested in reading ads from a decade ago, which is what you are getting.

Maybe some of you who would like other fotmats might want to make a donation to help TRAINLIFE offer alternate formats ? A valuable resource like TRAINLIFE should be supported so that it doesn't end up having to fold for lack of funds, or need to REQUIRE paid subscriptions.

Just my opinion.

Agreed!!

And to find the issues you want, the index is back:

Because it's usually better than the alternative.

"gs" (ghostscript) isn't a command installed on most PCs.

But it can be trivially (and freely!) installed.