Month: November 2025

I was hunting around the web for an article from an Italian encyclopedia, when I struck lucky.  All twelve volumes had been digitised to PDF, and they were available to download from Archive.org.  Great news!

Well, I only needed volume nine, so I grabbed that.  To my shock, the PDF was over 3 GIGABYTES in size!  That would mean the whole encyclopedia would take a massive 40gb out of my disk space. Yet each volume is only 1200 pages, and I think all of the pages are black and white.

Nor was this the only problem.   A 3Gb PDF is such a large file that Abbyy Finereader wouldn’t open it.  My anti-virus picked it up and complained about it.  My long outdated copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 9  wouldn’t extract the three pages that I actually needed.  Nor would it print those three pages.  I thought about just buying a copy of whatever the latest version of Acrobat Pro might be; but dear old Adobe, an evil company, has quietly removed the option.  All you can buy is a monthly subscription.

So what on earth to do?  Why was the file so large anyway?

Thankfully I found a free downloadable tool for Windows called PDFSam Basic.  This allowed me to split off the first  few pages, and then I could work with them in Adobe Acrobat 9 as usual.  I extracted the first page to png format, and found that that one page alone was more than 3 megabytes in size.  That’s the same size as a full-colour photograph on my digital camera.  Whoever had made the scans had done so at maximum resolution, in full colour.  For black-and-white text pages.  [Update: do NOT use PDFSam!  It also silently installed it’s paid for model, and the uninstall did not work.]

Well, I used PDFSam to chop the 3Gb monster up into three files, and then I used Adobe Acrobat to “save as” these out to PNG, with settings RGB=off, colourspace=Monochrome.  This produced a directory full of .png files, one for each page, none larger than 150kb, and often much less.  The first page was no longer 3mb but 36kb.  Then I gathered these up into a PDF using Adobe Acrobat and… the PDF file for all the pages was now a  mere 109mb.  Much more sensible.

Only afterwards did it occur to me that this sort of task is what ImageMagick is for.  It’s a very powerful command line tool.  But I don’t currently have that installed because it has so many switches and options that I use it rarely.  And working out what option to use takes a while.

Inspecting the new PDF, I saw that the scanning had been done extremely carelessly.  The opening pages had a large stain across them:

Anybody who has used a photocopier knows that this happens when you haven’t got the page flat on the copier.  Sheer carelessness.

And that’s actually the cause of the huge page sizes too.  Whoever did the scan didn’t bother to set the copier up correctly.  They just scanned at max resolution, full colour, and let the output be whatever size it might be.  Whoever did it was NOT the person who was going to need to use the file.

I think we can all guess how this might happen.  What sort of person has young people at their disposal to do chores like this?

So… my friends, whenever you get a student to scan a book for you, do please remember that they don’t want to do it, and CHECK the results?  Thank you.

Update: Further experiments show that I don’t need to use PDFSam – Acrobat will save as the whole file to .png, even if it won’t do much else.

Today is All Saints’ Day, and I have been looking at the entry for this in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, and attempting to learn some real history about the origins of the medieval festival.

The ODCC has no footnotes, just a short bibliography.  The first of these is Eisenhofer’s Handbuch der katholischen Liturgik, erster band (1932), which I was delighted to discover online at a magnificent German site devoted to Catholic literature, the Deutches Liturgisches Institut.  In the entry, the dedication of an oratory in St Peter’s by Gregory III (731-741) “in honor of the Redeemer, his holy mother, all the apostles, martyrs, and all the perfectly righteous who have fallen asleep throughout the world,” is referenced to Duchesne’s edition of the Liber Pontificalis, vol. 1, 194-204; but also to “Kellner, Heortologie 241”.  The latter is “Heortologie oder das Kirchenjahr und die Heiligenfeste in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung.”

A quick Google search reveals that the Kellner book – by our old friend Heinrich Kellner, who translated all the works of Tertullian into English – exists online, in a 1901 edition; and also, blessedly, in an English translation of 1908, both issued by Herder.

The 1901 edition seems to be the wrong edition, but I can find no later one before 1908.  The material is on page 178.  The English translation is p.323.

But a worm of doubt entered my soul as I looked through the English material.  Because sometimes, in books of this vintage, the English translation omits some of the footnotes.  I encountered just this with Franz Cumont’s book on Mithras, translated into many languages.  And it was utterly infuriating.  Fascinating claims, unreferenced: but if you looked at the original, there was indeed a reference.

So I looked at the German.  And… I cursed heartily.  Yes, the English translation had two footnotes: the German had five!

And…

This is laziness by the translator and publisher and nothing else.

And there is worse.  Note that the English in footnote 1 gives the Patrologia Graeca reference with “l” instead of the correct volume, 50.  Mysteriously the Liber Pontificalis entry is different in footnote 3.

Check these things, boys.  Don’t take it for granted.