Getting High Quality Art From archive.org

OK, I hope I've convinced you that there is some really good free art in the page images at archive.org. However, the art you see when you flip through the pages online is NOT high enough resolution to use in a book. The good news is that much higher resolution images are available.

Check this URL:

http://archive.org/details/mahabharat...

Notice that on the left side of the page is an entry that looks like this:

All Files: HTTPS Torrent (2/0)

Click on HTTPS and you'll see this:

Index of /29/items/mahabharata01ramauoft/

../
mahabharata01ramauoft.djvu 22-Apr-2009 08:41 93959287
mahabharata01ramauoft.gif 22-Apr-2009 05:57 306063
mahabharata01ramauoft.pdf 22-Apr-2009 12:16 126285010
mahabharata01ramauoft_abbyy.gz 22-Apr-2009 06:12 133
mahabharata01ramauoft_archive.torrent 03-Aug-2012 04:37 25433
mahabharata01ramauoft_bw.pdf 22-Apr-2009 18:12 111039135
mahabharata01ramauoft_dc.xml 08-Apr-2009 15:29 407
mahabharata01ramauoft_djvu.xml 22-Apr-2009 06:12 89
mahabharata01ramauoft_files.xml 03-Aug-2012 04:37 5475
mahabharata01ramauoft_flippy.zip 22-Apr-2009 06:12 62902234
mahabharata01ramauoft_jp2.zip 22-Apr-2009 05:54 701398920
mahabharata01ramauoft_marc.xml 08-Apr-2009 15:29 3247
mahabharata01ramauoft_meta.mrc 08-Apr-2009 15:29 830
mahabharata01ramauoft_meta.xml 24-Nov-2010 21:29 1650
mahabharata01ramauoft_metasource.xml 08-Apr-2009 15:29 374
mahabharata01ramauoft_raw_jp2.zip 22-Apr-2009 05:52 795061048
scandata.zip

Of all of these, this is the one you want:

mahabharata01ramauoft_jp2.zip

This is about 70 megabytes of high resolution images in a zip file. Download it and unzip it.

You'll end up with several hundred page images in jp2 format.

JP2? What the heck is that? I hear you ask. Well, it is like JPEG but more highly compressed. It is also pretty useless, but the good news is you can convert it to JPGs.

How? By using a free software program called Image Magick:

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/ind...

Versions for several operating systems are available. Download the one you need and install it. If you have any notion of becoming a serious author I'd recommend using Linux. If you see yourself as anything less you can use whatever you like.

Image Magick does its magick from the command line. If you have three hundred odd page images to convert from JP2 to JPEG you can set the command going, do something else while it chugs away, and when you return they are all converted.

Linux has an excellent command line. Windows is tolerable. Mac is supposed to be pretty good, but don't ask me how to find it.

The command you want to use, from the directory where the images are, is this:

mogrify -format jpg -quality 90% -verbose *.jp2

When it is done running you can delete all the JP2 files. Now you have a bunch of high resolution page images featuring beautiful, public domain, art. Or they would feature that if the pages weren't all yellow and crooked. There must be a way to use the computer to fix that, right?

Stay tuned.