Leonardo Da Vinci's Personal Notebook

IZ Reloaded writes "The British Library has made available 14 great books on its website. One of them is a 1508 notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci containing short treatises, notes and drawings of a wide range of subjects from mechanics to the moon. The site allows you to view the original manuscript written in Leonardo's own handwriting."

Great, but only the beginning....

[dr. loser]

This is a wonderful start to providing mass access to rare manuscripts.

Now if only they would post the complete papers of Milo Rambaldi [dayfornight.com]....

Re:Shockwave

[imsabbel]

Well, if they were available as pfds, they werent accessible at all for anybody besides schoolars that are intimate in his language and calligraphy.

The explaining texts and voiceovers are the real meat of this thing.

Re:Needs Shockwave

[Reality Master 101]

Not being a luddite, I of course used the Shockwave version. If you had tried it also, you would've noted that there was a good reason for it: it includes a cool magnifier to view the pages, as well as some other neat features.

Thank god we have people out there that aren't afraid to use technology to make things better, even if a small number of people whine about it. If people like you ran the world, we'd still be stuck using 80x25 column green screens.

And, as other people have pointed out, there is an alternative link. Nice of them.

Re:pdf

[Declarent]

I wasn't aware you could put voice commentary, the magnifier, and the text reversing mirror in a PDF document.

This is where we, as technophiles go wrong. The only thing that matters to us is the technology used to deliver the content, and we want the content to conform.

Everyone else wants the content to look and feel a certain way, and just select a tool out of the toolbox to make it so.

I think movies should be in PDF, too! One frame per page, that way everyone can see them without having to download a different tool!

It's not about the glass, it's about the water.

Re:Needs Shockwave

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it seems a bit close-minded to get up in arms about what is less then 1% of the people viewing websites. The fact that they provided a rich environment to view these works is good. As in all business models trying to sort out the final 10% of a probelm is always dispraportinatly expensive.

You can always get the text from project guttenburg, but then that's not a rich environment.

Stop whinging, you made a choice for a small platform and so that has consiquences. It's people who criticise these projects because they are not inclusive of a tiny minority of users that are vastly short sighted. Afterall they did not have to do anything other then show the books once every 20 years under glass in the British Library. The fact that they have done so and provided commentries and the ability to magnify etc should be applauded.