At 09:33 AM 11/12/2018 -0800, you wrote: >I hadn't noticed this before, but Tucker Electronics closed this past summer >:-( >who used to be a good source for manuals.
Oh no! Not them too. http://www.manualsplus.com is gone. And they dumpstered most of their huge warehouse full of manuals, despite a small and way too-late effort by some volunteers to rescue what they could. That was an utter disaster. Being on the other side of the planet (and not wealthy) sucks when I have to watch catastrophes like that happen. I thought that left Your Manual Source, but their URLs http://www.consolidatedsurplus.com/ and http://www.yourmanualsource.com don't seem to be functioning now. One is a domain squatter. What happened to them, does anyone know? Does anyone have a list of remaining sellers of original paper manuals? Especialy for instrument lines including Tek, HP, GR, etc. With all due respect to bitsavers and other archives of scanned manuals, I have a low opinion of current document scanning practices and archiving file formats. Two tone (fax mode) is sad, even if the resolution is high enough to be able to read the text. Not preserving gray levels on edges means the character outlines are ruined, gone forever. Not to mention what it does to screen printed images, or the lack of a format for combined text image plus searchable content. Hence I believe it's tragic and a cultural crime to be destroying old physical manuals. At all and especially while the technology of document capture and file formats is still so primitive. PDF... don't get me started on that unspeakable horror of a format. For me, the timing is terrible. I acquire what I can, mostly manuals for equipment I have, though my resources are very limited. I'm poor atm, but expect a considerable inheritance in next few years. I'd hoped the big manuals stores would still be around by then, and I could work on scanning significant amounts 'my way.' But it looks like I'm too late. Dammit. Guy
