Compiling Compilations

Now it is looking that through the work of Greg Stock and Greg Werner we may one day have the full set of Australian Soccer Weekly (later Australian & British Soccer Weekly) available in the archives one day, I've commenced work on making compilation files of various segments of the paper. Here's a little tutorial for anyone else that may be interested in doing the same.

Obviously a large collection like a full run of a newspaper contains a massive amount of data. The reason I'm making compilations is that some of this data related to specific competitions is not available elsewhere on the internet. The compilations may be later used to assist in addressing that. 

The compilations I'm working on are National Youth League pages, National Indoor Soccer League pages and pages on local Victorian soccer post the demise of Soccer Action. There are many other topics though, that some may want to make compilations of. Perhaps a fan of a particular NSL or state league club may want to compile a file with just the match reports of that club's matches. Or like I want to do, maybe people in other states would like a single document with the weekly page for their state or area on it. You may want to have all the women's football pages in one place etc etc.

The main website I use is https://www.ilovepdf.com/

To start, what you do is click on Split PDF then upload a issue of the paper you want to take pages from.

 

Once it is uploaded, you can select which pages you want to remove.

You can split multiple pages, so if the stuff you want is on pages 3, 4 and 5 you set that as your range and you will end up with a single file with those three pages on it. You can select multiple ranges from the one upload.

Once you have your pages split, you need to rejoin them. Simply select the Merge PDF option and upload all your split pages, line them up in the order you want them by dragging around the pages, then click on the big red Merge PDF button.

Once you have your new compilation, you may want to compress it a little and I Love PDF lets you do that as well. There is another website I do that with is well, and it's one that may be required prior to splitting some newspapers and magazines.

I Love PDF is free, but to a limit of files of a size of 100mb or less. https://tools.pdf24.org/ lets you compress files that are larger than that, which may be required for some of the newspapers in our archives. 

Select a file to upload, then wait for that to happen. It may take a while. Once the loading bar indicator is fully black, it will show you the file and it's existing size. Then you can click on the compress button.

The site compresses them a lot quicker than it takes to upload, but unlike I Love PDF does not download it's work automatically, so once the file has been compressed you will need to click on the download button.

Once that is done, you will have a compilation of pages in a manageable file size. 

As I've said, the options for making compilations are enormous. You may want to make one of player profiles only, one of a particular columnists' work (Johnny Warren, Tommy Anderson, Knut Werner), or one of national team match reports. If anyone makes a compilation which they'd like to share with others, get in touch and you can do that by having it added to the archives on this site.  

As always, click on images to enlarge.