Reading the Denní Hlasatel

Select the desired year from the archive home page. Years with issues available will appear in blue font and be clickable. 

A page will open for the year you select, with available issues in each of the 12 months indicated by the Adobe PDF icon. An “m” means that particular issue is missing.

Clicking the desired date will open the PDF issue in your browser. PDFs are large (anywhere from 15 to 95 MB) and will take a while to load, depending on the size of the file and your internet connection speed. (If your computer automatically downloads the PDF, use these instructions to set up Chrome to open PDFs in your browser.) 

The quality of the images—the crispness and the darkness/lightness—varies greatly. There was little we could do to improve this: the original newspapers were microfilmed more than 50 years ago. In time, as new affordable technology becomes available, we hope we will be able to improve the experience. 

Once the issue opens, you can click on the three bars in the upper left corner to open a panel of thumbnails on the left for quick navigation among the pages. Clicking on the three bars again will close the side thumbnail panel. 

Each daily issue is searchable. Currently there is no way to search more than one day at a time. Search results are impacted by the varying quality of the original microfilmed images and the limited capabilities of optical character recognition (OCR) software. 

You can take screen shots or download pages per the terms of use located at the bottom of this page. 

Enlarging the page can help with the selection process. Use your computer’s selection tool to highlight words and sentences for translation. Unfortunately, this is not always a straightforward process. 

OCR cannot always detect the column borders. If you are selecting text to copy and your selection tool pulls in text from adjoining columns, try to select slowly line by line until the extraneous lines outside the borders get selected and back up to the previous good line. Also, sometimes it works better to start selecting at the end of the article/paragraph and going up. 

Copy your selection and paste into your translation tool. Some browsers allow you to right-click on a selection and translate without leaving the page.

You can also “search with Google lens,” but this can be imprecise if the OCR cannot readily detect the column margins. 

Also, as mentioned above, OCR does not always correctly distinguish individual letters, so when you paste a passage into your translation software, it is important to compare your selection with the original and make any necessary spelling corrections and adding/removing diacritical marks to match original. 

Sometimes there are extraneous marks on the digitized page, a result of, e.g., scratches on the original microfilm or scribbles on the original newspaper page. These can change the OCR reading of a letter or word. Sometimes a space is added between letters; sometimes a space is missed between words. Again, comparison of the selection with the original is warranted to get a more accurate translation.

When a section of the page you are interested in is dark, you can save the page as an image file and lighten it. You’ll be surprised to discover that the words are there, appearing out of the dark shadows. (Sometimes, indistinguishable sentences in a darker area are nevertheless captured when selecting, and the OCR reader picks up the words and they appear when the selection is pasted into your translation app, e.g., Google Translate. 

If the page is too light to read, try darkening it. 

If the page(s) you want to read are particularly bad, nothing legible, you can put in a request to see if the 600 dpi copy might be legible. 

If you find an obituary, photograph, advertisement or article that you would like in a higher resolution image (or without our watermark), submit a request.