Reproductions will be made to the highest international standards at Bell & Howell’s laboratories near Oxford, England. Each disc will incorporate ADOBE ACROBAT® software, providing the user with built-in INDEXING and MAGNIFYING facilities, plus an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature with FULLY-SEARCHABLE TEXT and KEY-WORD HIGHLIGHTING facilities. Further features, e.g. ‘CLIPBOARD’, may be utilized by ‘exporting’ to ‘Word for Windows’ or other software packages.

IMPORTANT: GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR  ERA  SOFTWARE

The find facility is a very useful aid in locating names.  It should not be regarded as foolproof.  It is based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and may not recognize a word which, for example, contains a badly-printed letter or features a font with which it is unfamiliar.  Its performance can be enhanced, however.

A useful searching technique is to key in a name in full, e.g. HARRY LAUDER, and then to key in ‘HARRY’ and  ‘LAUDER’ separately.  Similarly, EMPIRE PLAYHOUSE, for example, could be keyed in as one name and then as two separate one-word entries.  It may also be productive to break down longer names and key in accordingly, e.g. ‘THORN’, ‘DIKE’ for THORNDIKE, ‘BARRY’, ‘MORE’ for BARRYMORE.

Where a name is spaced out, typically in the case of a short name occurring in a display box advertisement, e.g.  T  E  D     R  A  Y,  it will often be helpful to key in spaces between letters.

It is believed that users will warmly welcome the OCR facility as an extremely helpful research tool. But its limitations must be recognized.  The only way to create a 100% foolproof system would be to embark on a word by word transcription of the entire text of every issue, a massive undertaking that, quite apart from sacrificing much of the character of the original, would be so costly that only a few of the world’s elite research libraries would be likely to be able to afford the end product.

It is also advisable to use the ‘Graphics Select Tool’, rather than the ‘Text Select Tool’, to copy areas of text chosen for ‘export’ to another application as this reproduces the original text. Images captured this way can be enhanced using graphics applications such as Paintshop®. 

By using the ‘Text Select Tool’ you can ‘export’ the ‘OCR converted’ text and edit as a normal document although the accuracy of the conversion will depend upon the factors mentioned earlier.

Printing out: Any printer (laser or inkjet) using standard Windows drivers is suitable.  A Postscript printer will not be suitable.

PC requirements: The CDs will operate satisfactorily with 32mb of memory; a CD rom drive is required. As with all PC based systems performance is enhanced by using a faster processor, more internal memory and faster CD rom unit. A screen size of 800*600 is suitable.

Sample pages.

The pages below require Adobe Acrobat© Reader 3 or 4 (preferred version). The reader is available for free download here. 
Each of these sample files is approximately 600kb in size.

Sample page (July 22nd 1899)
Wait for the page to appear; click the "find" binoculars and search for "terry" (no quotes). Mention of Miss Ellen Terry should be located in an article concerning Sir Henry Irving. This page illustrates the factors mentioned above. Several instances of the word "Irving" are not located because of the print quality.

Sample page (Sep. 30th 1899)
Browse a page of advertisement; locate various "calls" for Empire theatres on the Stoll Circuit.

Sample page (Dec 9th 1899). 
Wait for the page to appear; click the "find" binoculars and search for "roslin" (no quotes). It will be highlighted in blue approximately centre-page.

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