2003 Notes

Miss Hagen’s 1929 book has long been out of print and very few hardcopies remain. An original hardcopy has been carefully scanned and converted to be available here on the internet.

This has been done as a tribute to the considerable contribution to the life of Ropley by Miss Hagen, both in her lifetime and now in the 21st century. The Coffee Room, which she so kindly donated to the village, is still in daily use and is a much valued asset to the social life of the village. Miss Hagen died in 1932.

The book provides a fascinating record of facts and stories about old Ropley.

To create this site, the book was scanned twice — once with FineReader OCR to extract the text and once with PaperPort to store images of the original pages for visual checking etc. The recognised text was pasted into Microsoft Word for spell checking and some reformatting. Finally, the Word document was copied into NetObjects Fusion 7 and the formatting fine-tuned to produce the web site as you see it. The photographs on the site are scanned from the book and the quality is compromised by the resolution of the original printing — clicking on a photo will open a new window with a larger version of the image.

The text of the book has not been changed or “modernised” in any way. Only very obvious printing errors were corrected. The web site has been arbitrarily split into separate pages to make viewing faster, but the Table of Contents is in the original layout and links to the appropriate page as required. Navigation through the whole book from page to page (not on Home or Contents pages) is best achieved via the “<==Previous Page” and “Next Page==>” links at top and bottom, or by using the Contents to jump to specific sections.

It is almost inevitable that errors have been introduced during the OCR process — if anybody spots one, please let me know via email.

Ron Beal, November 2003 — mailings@ronbeal.com