Sunday, November 4, 2018

The Only Good News About That Problem With the Chronicling America Website

I have found a clumsy workaround.  When I click the link on the index page, the page remains black, but red stripes show where the word "murders" appear.  If I have a pretty clear notion of where those spots are on the page, I can download the PDF and try to find those stories.   If not, I download the horribly mangled output of the OCR process and search for the word "murders."  (How they know where words appear when the OCR output is so badly scrambled leaves me scratching my head.)

It is a problem in both Chrome and Vivaldi but not a problem for any of you.  It really slows down this process.  I can make neither heads nor tails of the HTML responsible for these pages that might explain these problems.  Any suggestions?

It turns out that thevPDFs are not just images, but searchable text.  Not as nice as seeing the text in context, but still nice.

5 comments:

  1. Try Edge or Firefox? The page loaded fine for me in both those browsers. (Should be OK in IE, too, if you're not on Windows 10 and can't use Edge).

    Also--try viewing the page without adblocker? I use different blockers in Edge and FF, but neither browser blocked the image.

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  2. Turned off AdfBlock for that site and nothing changed. Maybe for all sites? Downloading Firefox right now.

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  3. Firefox has same behavior. These are tiled JPG images, which I have never heard of before.

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  4. I'm wondering if you have sufficient graphics memory on your computer, since three different browsers all give the same poor results?

    I have no problem viewing the image using Maxthon v5 browser or Opera v56. I've never encountered this type of image, it can be magnified (or zoomed-in) using the scroll wheel on my mouse- and the size of the image in bytes seems to change depending on the magnification.

    When it's fully magnified the area visible is very small, I count 21 characters across the image, and when I right-click on "Properties" the size of the image is "unknown." At no magnification the size is 92300 bytes, 513 x 513 Pixels, and the whole page is seen with plenty of black space around it.

    For what it's worth, I'm using Adblock Plus & that doesn't seem to have any effect on the image. Wish I had some ideas on what could be causing your problem, but I'm fresh out!

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  5. Eskyman: This perfectly three weeks ago.

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