Hi, I’m a bit embarrassed to be making such a simple post, but I was hoping someone who’s used Anna’s Archive before might be able to tell me if I’m making a simple mistake somewhere. I’m trying to get a copy of a textbook for a friend, and it is showing on AA, but when I download the file, it comes without any file type. AA is listing it as a PDF so I tried just adding the extension but no dice. After that I found a reddit post suggesting a similar issue from just 3 days ago, and they had tried uploading the file to chat GPT and were able to get it to repair the file partially. I tried that same and got the same result, it fixed the first 200 or so pages, but nothing after that. AA is indicating that they scraped the file from Internet Archive, but searching for the file on there isn’t giving any results so I can’t get it directly from IA. I would just assume it’s a booked file (which it very well might be) but the fact that the first 200 pages were recoverable makes me think it might still be in there somehow. If at all possible could anyone with experience using AA advise? (Also I’m specifically leaving out the title because I don’t want to break any rules, and to be clear, I’m not looking for someone to download it for me, just trying to understand if I’m doing something wrong)
If you have a Linux machine, have you tried poking it with
file? Alternatively you may try to match the first couple of bytes against the known magic bytes manually. Other than that it’s pretty hard to say for sure without the file itself.Fired up my uConsole and took a look. It is showing as a PDF document, version 1.5, 1028 pages (which matches up with what chat GPT tried to spit out). It’s weird that it’s recognized as a PDF but it somehow isn’t
I would try various CLI tools for poking the file, see if maybe it’s some specific page that’s broken and you can drop exactly that page or if splitting it into separate pages and assembling it back would magically fix it.
Worst case you’ll at least understand better what’s wrong with the file.
I know of QPDF and stapler.
If you are going to look for other ones, be sure to find those that are not just wrappers around the ones you already tried.