Page Viewer, Plain Text & Download Help

The page viewer and plain text page provides powerful tools for researchers to view, read and download pages and issues from the Michigan Citizen Digital Archive. The page viewer displays an image of a page within an issue of the Michigan Citizen.

Page viewer tools

To help you interact with the images in the Michigan Citizen Digital Archive we created a number of tools for you to use.

Zoom In / Zoom Out - Increase or decrease the size of the page image within the viewer.

Reset Viewer - Return image to default size.

Rotate the Image - Rotate the image 90 degrees. This is helpful when you encounter a page that is upside down or on its side due to a digitization error.

Select - Select to click-and-drag a box around a section of the image. You can then download only the selected section, zoom in further on that section or cancel and return to the full page viewer.

Search Keyword Highlights - Toggle the check box to see your search term(s) highlighted within the image. Hit highlighting also appears within the plain text below the image.

Report a Problem - Indicates the page you’re on along with your comment -- this helps us troubleshoot!

Tabloid Pages

You may come across an image of a page that isn’t in the typical vertical format of other newspaper pages: these belong to tabloids. Tabloids are small scale magazine style inserts that periodically appear in weekend or other special issues. Due to their unique format, some images have been digitized but not rotated correctly and appear upside-down or on their side. In turn, the plain text generated from these images may not be correct.

Report Problem

If you encounter tabloid or other pages that you suspect to have errors please contact us with the Report Problem link found at the bottom right of the page viewer window.

OCR and Plain Text

The plain text we provide is created using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR software "reads" the page images and makes a best guess at identifying the letters and words on a page. This is an automated process and subject to error -- particularly if the original printing or the scan is of poor quality, the fonts are difficult to read, or the text is lightly printed.

Even the best quality OCR usually contains an error or two per page. While this does not usually cause significant problems with searching, it does mean the plain text is not a fully faithful reproduction of the printed (or scanned) original.

We want to make plain text as accessible and usable as possible, please contact us with questions or concerns you have and we’ll do all we can to help with your research.

Download Options

Pages

Download PDF - Includes searchable text

Download Image - JPG file. Does not include searchable text

Download Text File - TXT File

Issues

Download PDF - Includes a cover page with pertinent issue metadata and is text-searchable

Download Text - Zip archive of TXT files for the issue that includes a README with pertinent issue metadata

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