Mulitpage pdf files may now be uploaded under certain condit
Mulitpage pdf files may now be uploaded under certain condit
(Translation of a German article originally written by Ernst Erb)
The topic of multipage pdf files has been under discussion for years. For various reasons I have put off handling this issue. One important reason is the potential to harm the performance and usability of our website. If a multipage pdf file has not been optimally formatted, there is danger that we may exceed our bandwidth capacity, and end up either dealing with higher costs or having to accept slow response time. Above all, one must keep in mind that in the winter, more than 250,000 individually generated pages are provided to more than 20,000 different users. That is on average 3 pages per second, and at peak times, we deliver more than 30 per second. Among these are pages with several MB of information. With these figures you can compute the necessary bandwidth (in bytes, not bits).
For digitized articles there is also the question of protection and providing attribution to RMorg: Most users find us via search engines or links, which may take the user directly to our pdf file, without any reference to us…
Under certain circumstances, one can now
Upload multipage pdf files to pages for countries, manufacturers/brands, models, and for tubes/semiconductors.
This can only be done through particular administrators to make sure the necessary requirements are properly met.
Although the main request for multipage pdf files has been to provide a means to handle detailed schematics and service literature, I have now provided a general solution.
Schematics and service literature for models
Normally, these are image scans that will only be available to members. You should only create a complete multipage pdf file if you have more than about a dozen pages. You should send these to the schematic administrator, who will check it and upload it. Note that no UACS points will be given for uploading multipage pdfs, and no points will be consumed for downloading multipage pdfs. For cases where the person providing a multipage pdf really needs some UACS credit, the admin can make such a request to me or the new member administrator.
Other literature relating to models
You can send these as multipage pdf files to a model administrator, who will check them and upload them to the model page. Here the objective is not necessarily to handle a large number of pages, but to enable the listing of documents on the model page and to handle things in a format that is not possible in the Forum. Most desirable here are fully digitized documents or original works that are likewise digitized. Here is a German pdf article relating to the Lumophon model WD310 by Peter Treytl, that I recommend as an example (this is an article comparing and contrasting the Philco 91B and the Lumophon WD310 cathedral radios – one American and one German from the same time period). Another example in English is this article on the Williamson Amplifier prepared by Charles Truscott (with digitization help from Thomas Günzel).
Documents about Manufacturers/Brands
Send these to the manufacturer administrator, whom you can find via the “Organization” link on the left side of the home page.
Documents about Countries
Send these to me (Ernst Erb) or use the Contact Form.
Documents relating to tubes/semiconductors
Send these to the tube or semiconductor administrator.
Requirements:
Generally, schematics and service literature will be available only to members, while other types of documents will be available to anyone. The following requirements must be followed:
- To the extent technically feasible, each page should include in its footer (along with page number) a reference to creator of the document and a link to Radiomuseum. Examples of this are visible in the articles about the Lumophon WD310 and Williamson amplifier mentioned above. If this is not possible, please inquire about a suitable solution.
- Whenever possible, the document should be machine-readable; that is, the documents should not simply be image scans (except for schematics). Include as many links as possible to our own Rmorg pages, but do not include links to other websites, unless they are functional links and have significant importance and longevity. Links to Wikipedia would be an example. Please confirm that the links in the pdf file work properly.
- If you use pictures from other sources, you must get permission from the source and mention this in a “courtesy remark.” Bibliographical references are encouraged, and are required for longer quotations. Quotations from other sources should be recognizable as such.
- Multipage pdf files should exhibit outstanding quality. Since we cannot give them stars like we do for Forum articles, we show them in a separate list. There is now a link to the list of recently available pdf files in the upper right area of the main Forum page and the main Papers page.
Special thanks to our administrators, who will be taking care of the uploading and document quality control. I don't anticipate this will generate a huge new workload for the admins, since relatively few people will likely take the time to generate multipage pdf files, but at least we now have this new option available.
To thank the Author because you find the post helpful or well done.