Landships II

bigtank · Major

Paint Schemes Tanks WW I newspaper POLIGON

Gwyn Evans · Legend

Bigtank

My computer says it'll take me 10 minutes to download this. Is it worth waiting for?

Gwyn

bigtank · Major

Gwyn, if you collect materials for the tanks from WW I, I think I can wait 10 minutes:) Andy

PS.

And even 11 - 12 minutes� biggrin

-- Edited by bigtank on Thursday 10th of February 2011 12:14:51 AM

BLOWHARD · Lieutenant

I think it's worth 10 minutes. Thanks for posting BT :)

PDA · Legend

Looks good - it's a military vehicle magazine, in Polish (I think), with no English. For the WW1 section, most of the photos are fairly commonplace, but there are a couple I hadn't seen. There are some good colour illustrations, and one in particular stands out; a Mark IV tank in a camouflage scheme, described in the magazine as the Solomon scheme (but looking more like the one used on Mark V tanks in the RCW, to my eye). Seems odd to me; were any Mark IV tanks painted thus?

There is also a section on Polish (?) armour that contains the Vickers and Renault FT tanks.

If anybody knows of a translation program that will "read" a pdf and spit out a translated copy, I'd be all ears.

(Oh, and it only took 4 minutes here)

Rectalgia · Legend

PDA wrote:
...If anybody knows of a translation program that will "read" a pdf and spit out a translated copy, I'd be all ears.

(Oh, and it only took 4 minutes here)

Can't help with this one - unfortunately the whole thing, including text) seems to have been rendered as graphics images (which is undoubtedly why it is so huge) necessitating OCR to recover the text and I can't do that with the "free" tools I have, with the standard interfaces they use - would have to print it and scan but with special Polish (?) characters it wouldn't work at all well anyway, I can tell.

But my download time was certainly less than the threatened 10 minutes too.

Otherwise (if converted from text and graphics, like with a Word document or Powerpoint presentation "Saved as" PDF) it would be a far smaller file AND you could open the saved file with your browser (IE8, Firefox, whatever, "Open with") and use the dreaded Google translator bar (if you had it, need to be working "online", connected to the internet) to translate the text. Worth remembering as a tip if you come across a "proper" document to PDF file conversion anytime. [on edit] Oh, you can/should be able to use your browser anyway, but just as an alternative to Adobe, CutePDF, whatever - it will be using an Adobe "helper" application to open the document.[/edit]

{sigh} I remember when a 58 Mb file would represent about 116,000 pages (of text). But this file is free. And has stuff I haven't seen before. And it doesn't mention Patton and Cambrai in the same sentence. It has a lot going for it. Thanks to BT for providing the link and commenting on the significance.

Maybe someone else has something to handle it?

-- Edited by Rectalgia on Thursday 10th of February 2011 05:39:26 AM

Albert · Brigadier

PDA, you're right, it is a Polish bi-monthly (previously a quarterly) magazine published since 2006. The title "Poligon" means "firing ground". In other issues there were at least 2 more articles on British WW1 tanks by the same author (one about�first projects�in issue 4/2010 - excerpt here: http://www.magnum-x.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1160&catid=2&Itemid=13�, other about debut at Flers-Courcelette in issue 1/2011 - excerpt here : http://www.magnum-x.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1419&catid=2&Itemid=13�).

The article in an issue 5/2010 that can be downloaded via link presented in�the first post in this topic is titled "Development of a British doctrine of usage of tanks in World War I".

-- Edited by Albert on Thursday 10th of February 2011 10:03:18 AM

bigtank · Major

Hello .
I found a few more photos on FLICKR, maybe someone is missing in your collection. They are big .. Andy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/drakegoodman/sets/72157625639179301/with/5407427892/

-- Edited by bigtank on Thursday 10th of February 2011 11:31:22 AM

PDA · Legend

Yes, "Drakegoodman" is a long-time friend of ours, and has an excellent collection of interesting WWI photos. He kindly provided the large photo in the new�Flying Pig article.

A most interesting magazine, bigtank, thanks for the link. And thank you, Albert, for the extra information. There is a similar magazine available, in English language, called Military Machines International. "Great War Tank" from this forum has written a lot of excellent articles�for it, all about WWI trucks (or "lorries", as they say in Britain).

CharlieC · Legend

Getting text out of a .pdf is a bit painful but doable. You have to have a copy of Acrobat
- the full thing not just the reader. This allows export of single pages and saving the single page as a .tif (image file). There are some fairly good OCR programs around - ABBY Finereader offers OCR to different character sets such as Polish. Once the text is captured as a bunch of Unicode characters then it can be run through a translator to turn it into approximate English. Polish -> English translation isn't all that good because of the multiplicity of verb forms in Polish.

The Poligon scan is farly high res - looks like it was done on a decent scanner at 600 dpi so it should run through OCR fairly well.

Here's the raw translated summary text from the article using the process above:

"The invention of new means of fighting does not automatically mean that it will revolutionize the conduct combat operations. It is essential to the doctrine of its use, in a skilful way of reconciling the advantages of the new weapon to its drawbacks. This is especially important when placing the measure entirely new, unprecedented. An example is the attempt to develop a doctrine of the use of armor by Britain during World War l."

Regards,

Charlie

-- Edited by CharlieC on Thursday 10th of February 2011 01:58:12 PM

-- Edited by CharlieC on Thursday 10th of February 2011 01:58:42 PM

Ironsides · Legend

"text out of a .pdf is a bit painful but doable. You have to have a copy of Acrobat"

Hi�All, Foxit reader will do that for free since I started using it Ive dumped acrobat.. the version I have is the free Foxit pdf reader ver 3.1 you can do a whole load of stuff with it, copy text and images bookmarks searches etc etc and its less then 10 meg total on your harddrive...

Copied direct and pasted to this thread from PDf book Airplane photography using foxit..

"CHAPTER V
THE SHUTTER
Permissible Exposure in Airplane Photography. A
definite limitation to the length of .exposure in airplane
cameras is set by the motion of the plane. If we represent
the speed of the plane by S, the altitude of the plane by A,
and the focal length of the lens by F, we obtain at once
from the diagram (Fig. 19), that s, the rate of movement of
the image on the plate, is given by the relation,
JL = *L
S A
If we call the permissible movement d, then the permis-
sible exposure time, t, is- given by the relation"

see below Image created using foxit from PDF reader and Windows Paint�from Airplane Photography no relation to text.

The text image below is done the same way but saved as bitmap rather then jpg

Cheers wink

-- Edited by Ironsides on Thursday 10th of February 2011 03:25:07 PM

Rectalgia · Legend

CharlieC's mention of TIFF jogged my memory - anyone with a reasonably up to date version of MS Word has access to Microsoft Office Document Imaging (though it is not necessarily installed by default and may take a little fiddling to get running correctly with the "Home" version of Word/Office).

So another approach is to do a "print screen" of the document from whatever PDF reader, dump the image into Paint, snip and copy the text part, paste it back into Paint as a new image and save that as TIFF, open the saved TIFF with Microsoft Office Document Imaging ("Open With"), use the "Recognize Text Using OCR" tool then the "Send Text to Word" tool and the text can then be copied and pasted out of Word into the on-line "Google Translate". The OCR is a bit primitive so the result of the translation of that headline and summary as attempted by Charlie (with just a little fiddling with the headline - the OCR for that is particularly atrocious) is not pretty:
Development British doctrine uiycia gzotgow in World War I

The invention of new means of fighting does not automatically mean that it will revolutionize the conduct combat operations. Nlezb�dna to this doctrine is used, in the manner godz4ca umiejtny advantages of the new weapons zjej drawbacks. Wain is especially for the entry of a new center zupetnie, unseen before. Przyktadem it is an attempt to develop a doctrine of life � armor by Wielk4 Brytani� during the First World War.Pretty awful but it could be improved a lot with just a little (more) manual correction of the raw OCR.

And, I seem to recall there is another "free" OCR avenue through MS Office "Side Note"/"One Note" but I don't actually use that myself. But anyone used to it might find it far simpler than the method above, I don't know.

Ah, the wonders of collaboration!! (and they used to shoot people for that). Anyway, it seems there are many options, after all.

CharlieC · Legend

There's a bit of a misunderstanding about .pdfs in Ironsides' post.

The Poligon magazine was scanned, which produces an image file (.tif, .bmp) of a page. The page images were then wrapped into a .pdf so there is no character information in this file, just images. To retrieve the text so that it can be run through a translator requires an OCR step. To get suitable input to OCR the page image files have to be extracted from the .pdf. Unfortunately, although Foxit is a damn good .pdf reader, it doesn't have this functionality.

Since cut and paste worked for the .pdf file Ironsides used in his example it must have had the text as characters in the .pdf. Although useful this isn't helpful for scanned documents.

I note that the Microsoft route isn't particularly accurate judging from the number of original Polish or approximately Polish words left in the translated text.

Regards,

Charlie

Ironsides · Legend

Hi heres a new file scanned from the image file above and saved as a word doc using omnipage se (came with my scanner)... it did go through a spell checker but�I ignored errors.. I have no idea whats its capable of as�its not something�I normally use, but seems to be capable of copying images to text what you get depends on the quality of the original�image I guess...

Ok I copied part of the text from the polish article as a test using the foxit option for image�and saved it as a bit map in paint, then scanned it using the polish text option in omnipage(this is only a basic version) and put the result through an online translater...
Not Brilliant really I think with stuff like this you really need someone conversant with polish to do it, heres the result.. some words are clearly not in google dictionary...

Cheers smile

-- Edited by Ironsides on Friday 11th of February 2011 05:00:50 PM

Ironsides · Legend

colour plate of number 4 is a bit odd...

4. Tank Mark IV "Male"from unidentified British units. The vehicle has an interesting, multi-colored camouflage (Log, Solomon Camouflage Scheme), the beginning of 1917

Any ideas

Cheers smile

PDA · Legend

Ironsides wrote:

colour plate of number 4 is a bit odd...

4. Tank Mark IV "Male"from unidentified British units. The vehicle has an interesting, multi-colored camouflage (Log, Solomon Camouflage Scheme), the beginning of 1917

Any ideas

Cheers

That's what I said. It looks odd; more like RCW camo used on a Mark V. Maybe it is�a Mark IV used in a film:

Thanks for the answers regarding translating the download. They sound labour intensive, if not complicated. I can't see myself doing that for the whole magazine.

�

-- Edited by PDA on Saturday 12th of February 2011 12:34:29 AM

Ironsides · Legend

Hi PDA I think Im�going to have a go at translating the text for the article,�Iv been looking for software which might help and is low cost(read that as no cost)... this has more to do with another project Im looking at which has nothing to do with WW1 though, but it will give me some usefull�practice...

The camo scheme ses early 17 so one assumes they actually have some evidence perhaps theres something in the text we will see..

Cheers wink

-- Edited by Ironsides on Saturday 12th of February 2011 01:22:41 AM

bigtank · Major

Hello again:)
I will not have problems with reading in Polish wink

..... The following link to a newer POLIGON number, are also materials for WW I, the paint schemes in the four kicks by Mark I, a few pictures and a lot of text in the Polish language� biggrin

Andy

http://hotfile.com/dl/103150931/3ff7e5d/Poligon_2011-01.pdf.html

-- Edited by bigtank on Saturday 19th of February 2011 05:33:31 PM

Date: Dec 15, 2015

I find another free online ocr http://www.online-code.net/ocr.html, supports 40+ languages, can convert image to plain txt file and searchable pdf document.