2000 Ensign and older

Is there any way to download the Ensign magazine from 2000 and older? I've downloaded everything from 2001 till now, but I want to get the older magazines.

atikokan wrote:Is there any way to download the Ensign magazine from 2000 and older? I've downloaded everything from 2001 till now, but I want to get the older magazines.

For the older magazines, there is not currently a PDF download of the text available.

Of course, the HTML text for each article is available, but saving it all in a PDF format would require you to visit each article for a given month, use a PDF printer to print the article and save it as PDF, then (optionally) put those PDFs together in a single PDF for the month (some PDF printers allow you to queue up multiple print jobs and output a single PDF, or there are PDF utilities to merge the smaller PDFs into one).

Then repeat for each month for the 30 years (1971-2000) that are available. That sounds very tedious, but it could be done. Or you could wait and hope that the Church makes the older issues available in PDF format, but there's no guarantee that will ever be done.

PDFs (from the original or a scan) are nice because you get the full content layout, you have the page numbers, and you can verify specific things that may be missing from the HTML versions by accident. I run into missing items from time to time in the HTML pages for older issues.

My guess is that the church has PDFs of the Ensign back to 2001 is because they started using them for press at that time. We've only had PDF since 1993 and when the format originally appeared, it was not sufficient for printing things like magazines directly from a PDF file.

I took a look at the history of the PDF format, and it looks like it was around 2000 that the PDF format was revised to make it possible to go to press directly from it. Although you could print a PDF before then, commercial printing needs more information than what was available in a PDF you could print at home or work.

To make older magazines available in PDF might be a lot more effort. Although the church might be able to re-open some older file formats and print them to PDF, that would only go a few years back. Going all the way into the 1970s is going to require scanning and OCR and likely service volunteers to proof the OCRs.

Thanks for researching about PDFs.
Even a non-OCR scan would be nice – there's got to be some church member on the internet who's scanned a lot of old magazines!

sbradshaw wrote:PDFs (from the original or a scan) are nice because you get the full content layout, you have the page numbers, and you can verify specific things that may be missing from the HTML versions by accident. I run into missing items from time to time in the HTML pages for older issues.

One of the reasons you run into missing items from time to time in the HTML pages is because the Church does not have copyright permission to distribute those items electronically. With the advent of PDF and all its wonders today, along with the planned worldwide distribution of materials, including Church magazines, headquarters is much better now at obtaining worldwide electronic distribution rights, whereas that was not a major consideration in the earlier print days.