[HN Gopher] Complete Digitization of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex A...
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Complete Digitization of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus
Author : emmelaich
Score : 131 points
Date : 2025-10-28 03:32 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| kragen wrote:
| This is beautiful! I am having some difficulty with the UI; is
| there a torrent? Images like https://codex-
| atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/assets/500/000R-1.jpg are too low in
| resolution for good archival; you can't even read the writing.
| trvz wrote:
| Manipulate the URL for a higher resolution:
| https://codex-atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/assets/2000/000R-1.jpg
|
| You don't need to depend on others to create a torrent, as
| bestowed upon you was the power of wget! wget
| https://codex-
| atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/assets/2000/000R-{1..1119}.jpg
| wget https://codex-
| atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/assets/2000/000V-{1..1119}.jpg
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Any idea on how to best compile it to an ebook? Just stuffing
| the jpgs into a pdf rarely works well...
| c0balt wrote:
| I haven't that done this in some time, but templating some
| markdown code for pandoc and creating an ebup might be a
| viable avenue.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Oooh... I have even less luck with epub, when the pages
| are an image-per-page.
| kragen wrote:
| Maybe what rarely works well for NoMoreNicksLeft is
| having a gigabyte of JPEGs in a single HTML chapter
| inside the epub? In that case you could do something like
| divide the files into 373 "chapters" of 6 pages each?
|
| One of the fragmentary editions I linked on the Archive
| uses the .cbr Comic Book Reader format; perhaps that is a
| better format than .epub for high-resolution scans of
| every page?
| eMPee584 wrote:
| ocrmypdf (rocks!)
| foofoo12 wrote:
| I usually do what rarely doesn't work well for you, but it
| works decently for me. You get 1 page per image and the
| image isn't compressed or touched at all.
| apt install img2pdf img2pdf *.jpg -o leonardo-da-
| book.pdf
| nunodonato wrote:
| wouldnt this mess up the order? I think you are supposed
| to view it like R1, V2, R2, V2, etc
| foofoo12 wrote:
| Yes, this was just an example. Using wildcard expansion
| will give you whatever order the your current shell seems
| fit. Bash does alphabetical order.
| kragen wrote:
| More like echo $(for page in {1..1119};
| do for side in R V; do echo
| "000$side-$page.jpg"; done; done)
| atoav wrote:
| Calibre comes with a ebook-convert command, that one might
| work
| ticulatedspline wrote:
| Easy way would be to just drop them in a zip and label it
| .cbz. Most readers handle CBR/CBZ just fine.
| kragen wrote:
| Oh, is .cbz that simple? Does it use the file order of
| the zipfile members or some other order?
| (https://acbf.fandom.com/wiki/ACBF_Editor_-
| _Creating_Metadata says it uses alphabetical order, which
| is the wrong order in this case.)
|
| It may be useful to use zip -Z store. JPEG data isn't
| going to get much benefit from another layer of LZ77.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Or in PowerShell on Windows: 1..1119 | % {
| iwr "https://codex-
| atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/assets/2000/000R-$_.jpg" -OutFile
| "000R-$_.jpg" } 1..1119 | % { iwr "https://codex-
| atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/assets/2000/000V-$_.jpg" -OutFile
| "000V-$_.jpg" }
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Some people around me swear PowerShell has better user
| experience than unix shells, but then I keep seeing
| examples like these. How on earth could people prefer this
| compared to `wget https://codex-
| atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/assets/2000/000V-{1.....`?
| kragen wrote:
| In this case presumably the main difference is not
| PowerShell vs. bash but iwr vs. wget? Because I think
| this is roughly equally bad (untested):
| for page in {1..1119}; do iwr "https://codex-
| atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/assets/2000/000R-$page.jpg"
| -OutFile "000R-$page.jpg" iwr "https://codex-
| atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/assets/2000/000V-$page.jpg"
| -OutFile "000V-$page.jpg" done
|
| Also until recently bash didn't have {42..53} syntax. You
| had to use `seq`. There was an alternative name for `seq`
| in Unix Power Tools, `jot`, because it wasn't standard:
| https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/unix/upt/ch45_11.htm. This
| section was by ORA author and sysadmin Linda Mui
| (https://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/268), but I don't know if
| she wrote `jot` or just popularized it.
| kragen wrote:
| Thanks! On my cellphone not even enough of the UI was working
| for me to discover those URLs. I suspect a certain amount of
| error recovery is in order for wgetting all 2238 images. 2000
| seems to be the maximum resolution available, which is under
| 100dpi. A few of the images seem to have been uploaded to
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Codex_Atlanticus.
|
| There are a couple of scans of a 43-page Italian edition
| published by Ulrico Hoepli on the Archive:
| https://archive.org/details/codex-atlanticus-leonardo-da-
| vin... https://archive.org/details/codex-atlanticus-leonardo-
| da-vin... but they seem to be of very poor quality.
|
| I'm done downloading now (with a sleep of 1 second between
| pages), and I have 1064125470 bytes of JPEG files, a very
| reasonably torrentable size. I'll see if I can put together a
| torrent and upload to the Archive and Commons...
| vim-guru wrote:
| Why are some of the pages upside down?
| b34k3r wrote:
| just rotate your monitor
| foofoo12 wrote:
| Da Vinci was showing off.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| It's a bit bananas, but probably just because he could. He also
| wrote his personal notes in "mirror writing":
|
| > The notes on Leonardo da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man image
| are in mirror writing. Leonardo da Vinci wrote most of his
| personal notes in mirror writing, only using standard writing
| if he intended his texts to be read by others
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_writing
| whatever1 wrote:
| How much talent can fit in a person? This is how much.
| nunodonato wrote:
| indeed! The biography of Leonardo was an amazing read. Highly
| recommend it
| proee wrote:
| Can you recommend the author?
| nunodonato wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(Isaacson_b
| o...
|
| The same author who wrote some other famous biographies. I
| know some people prefer other DaVinci's biographies. I
| didn't read others to be able to compare, but I really
| enjoyed this one.
| kragen wrote:
| Nitpick: "da Vinci" wasn't our homeboy's name. That just
| means "from Vinci". He was "Leonardo", like many other
| people, so we added "da Vinci" to clarify which Leonardo
| we meant, just like you might say, "Jessica from church
| came by," to clarify that you didn't mean Jessica the ex-
| girlfriend. Surnames weren't very widely used in Italy
| then.
|
| It's like "Jesus of Nazareth"; you wouldn't talk about
| "other OfNazareth's biographies". Ain't grammatical.
| cma wrote:
| It's fine. John Smith once meant the John who works as a
| blacksmith etc. Whatever the original meaning we now
| widely take da Vinci to be the last name if we don't
| speak Italian.
| kragen wrote:
| I agree that the error is common. Try to make new errors
| instead of repeating common errors.
| card_zero wrote:
| Does this also apply to DiCaprio? His name seems to
| translate as "the deer's Leonardo", or maybe "the goat's
| Leonardo". Possibly "son of a goat".
|
| Wikipedia says that Leonardo da Vinci was properly
| Leonardo son of Piero from Vinci son of Antonio son of
| another Piero son of Guido. I'm not sure that moving to
| surnames was a mistake, you know.
| kragen wrote:
| Nope, that's his actual surname. He wasn't born in the
| 16th century.
| card_zero wrote:
| But at some point back in time, when an ancestral
| DiCaprio was first referred to as just "DiCaprio", that
| was an error, right? He should properly be called _Quello
| Figlio di Caprio,_ that son of a goat. It 's not too
| late.
| kragen wrote:
| Probably not, no, and AFAIK Leo is a nice guy who doesn't
| deserve to be deprecated in that way.
| cma wrote:
| Descriptive linguistics, how stuff is actually used, is a
| lot more useful in practical real-life communication vs
| prescriptive.
|
| Da Vinci is a shorthand that everyone will understand vs
| just calling him Leonardo. Writing Leonardo da Vinci will
| be more explicit but will come off much more formal and
| stilted.
| kragen wrote:
| Nobody who knew Leonardo called him "da Vinci", any more
| than you would call Jessica "from church" ("Hey, is From
| Church coming over tonight?") or Venezuelans would call
| Hugo Chavez Frias "Mr. Frias". "Descriptive linguistics"
| is not a magic trump password that makes all erroneous
| utterances correct. If you haven't studied 16th-century
| Italian, you're going to make errors when you name 16th-
| century Italians.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > John Smith once meant the John who works as a
| blacksmith etc.
|
| Yes, modern surnames largely evolved from descriptive
| epithets added to distinguish different people of the
| same given name, but that doesn't retroactively transform
| the descriptive epithets of commonly applied to people
| who lived in the past into surnames _for those people_.
| nunodonato wrote:
| amazing! The categorization is nice, but I would love to see some
| sort of "tag cloud" that would allow use to view more specific
| content. How long until someone creates a tool to RAG the hell
| out of this? :)
| Isamu wrote:
| If you get an opportunity to see them in person, it's worth it
| because the fine details are that much more impressive up close.
| Every photo I've seen is not as good. Also the illustration is
| tinier than you would think.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Interesting UI --- wants a full-screen mode and 2-up view and a
| way to remove all the chrome/UI....
|
| An earlier example of this sort of thing was Bill Gates' purchase
| of the Codex Leceister
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester which was then
| digitized and released on a CD-ROM by Corbis:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(video_game)
|
| which was quite engaging, but sadly trapped in the technology of
| the time --- anyone know of an updated version of it?
| mzs wrote:
| https://codex-atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > We use it to express mild surprise that one person could use
| both their left and right hemispheres equally well.
|
| When did this myth become so perpetuated? It's infuriating. I
| blame university administration. I can't think of any other
| reason to so firmly distinguish different areas of thought.
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| I'm training a model based on this /s
| felixbraun wrote:
| Excellent work -- reminds me of similar projects built with the
| same tech stack:
|
| - Coins: A journey through the Munzkabinett Berlin collection
| (one of the largest in the world). https://uclab.fh-
| potsdam.de/coins/
|
| - Theodor Fontane Marginalia: A visualization of Fontane's
| marginalia and notes in his personal library. https://uclab.fh-
| potsdam.de/ff/
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(page generated 2025-10-28 23:01 UTC)