Searchable Monotype Recorders

[Dave Hughes]

I'm pleased to announce that the site's collection of Monotype Recorders is now searchable.

With a total of just over 60 issues, I believe it is the largest collection available on the internet.

The Monotype Recorder page now has a Google search box near the top, which will perform a search of the entire collection. Also, when you have a copy open in a browser window, you can search through it using the "Find . . ." function.

I am planning on making the entire Library searchable in the near future, and will make an announcement here when the work is done.

[KPMartin]

I just took it for a spin with less than ideal results.

I thought at first that is was just searching the entire web until I realized that the results page started with adverts, completely filling the screen, and I had to scroll down to find the actual search hits...

I tried searching for "univers" (the typeface) and "unit shift" (the latter both with and without the quotation marks) and neither gave me any useful hints. This may be because neither of these topics is mentioned in Monotype Recorder, but are instead in one of the other periodicals that Monotype (either English or Lanston) has produced or been associated with.

[Dave Hughes]

Thanks for giving it a try Kevin, agreed the result isn't ideal, but it is a lot better than it was.

Previously the PDFs were just scans of the pages but now they have been run through an OCR program so the text can be "read" by a computer.

The search box on site includes all the Recorders, not just the ones that Google have indexed. It will take Google a while to realise that they have all been OCRd and include them in their search results, but that will eventually happen.

Agreed the ads are not ideal, but Google doesn't do anything for free! On the plus side I liked how the results also showed the cover image.

The site search box is only a part of the improvement. Eventually they will become more visible on Google, and also when you have an individual copy open in your browser you can use the "find" function to search it, which was not previously available. There has also been a small amount of space-saving.

I will be OCR-ing the rest of the Library publications in due course.

[Dave Hughes]

I've just done a quick search for "univers" on my phone, and got the results below, which I didn't think was too bad. Google a little inconsistent in page title though!