If they were serious about adding this, it shouldn't take eight years...

It's been FIVE years. Still no update? This site is such a scam. If you only get your votes back by these being closed, how do you let something sit for this long? I can't believe the British National Archive supports a company like this.

Hello, you've been working on this for a long time, and we are paying customers. I like to work from PDFs because I can highlight parts or make notes on them, and easily find the notes later by searching. It's very frustrating to download files to work on later, and then find I have to go back to source, and either type or dictate the information I want. When the PDFs are illegible, the text box on your page tends to be gibberish as well, and very slow to correct.

I created an account today with the intention of purchasing a subscription, but the first article I downloaded was unreadable. I also have a subscription at newspapers.com and irishnewsarchive.com and both offer high-quality PDF downloads. Why does BNA prevent users from downloading readable copies?

I agree with comments here. I have used other Newspapaer on line archives in US, Canada, France, Spain and Italy, and this one is the worst I have ever used: I have never found in other sites such low resolution pdfs when downloading. They are useless. Nosense having a download option when pdfs are so poor.
I see that this complain has been done six years ago and nothing has been done by The BNA; it seems they have no intention to improve the website, so I will not renew my subscription.

i just signed up and paid only to find out about this massively annoying problem. I won't renew my subscription, the service is completely useless!

And still unreadable PDF's. And that's what I paid for. Will not renew my subscription either as I understand it will not be changed anyway. Already found better alternatives like https://go.newspapers.com/

I've found that PDFs I downloaded in 2013 are much higher resolution than if I downloaded the same page now (1990kb compared to 720kb). The more recent version is illegible. Why is this?

I see this has been open for *five years* so I doubt anything will change, but just came to add my voice. I can already take a screenshot of the high quality image, so why not just enable high quality PDFs? We all pay enough for a subscription to cover the small increase in bandwidth this would create.

Very disappointed by this! Just signed up for a subscription and it turns out the downloaded pdfs are massively compressed compared to the version you see in the viewer. Ludicrous!

My guess is it's intentional behaviour to some extent; it keeps you locked into a subscription rather than creating your own local archive.

The compression applies to PRINTING too, which is just nuts. Won't be renewing my subscription.

and 4 1/2 years later still no improvement. This 1905 paper is very clear when viewing the site, but try reading the pdf without getting a headache !

So is this EVER going to be reviewed?????

I've raised this issue a number of times - the PDFs are useless. On 12 June 2015 you said you would "take a look at the options". Almost two years later, nothing has changed. You clearly chose the "ignore it, it will go away" option. Not good customer service.

Seconded.

The downloaded pdfs are nearly illegible. They're pretty much worthless, in fact. Is there any hope for better quality coming in the future? And OCR within the PDF would be nice, too. Have you seen the Australian National Library's online newspaper collection? Maybe you could buy the same software as they use. Their site is pretty much perfect.

I agree. The downloaded PDFs should also include the OCRed text.

Since it doesn't, I tried to run the images through several different OCR softwares (Acrobat Pro, Prizmo, etc). No matter how much I tweaked, none of them could recognize much of anything beyond headlines because of the extreme compression and low resolution.

Overall, I am very disappointed in the quality of the downloaded PDFs. I'm paying for this!

Why on earth did you change the download system? It was so simple before. Now it's convert to Word, send to cloud, take out a subscription for Adobe etc. When you do get an article out it's unreadable. Talk about going backwards.

I use a big monitor (actually a virtual VERY big monitor) and take a screen shot

Wholeheartedly agree with the need for resolution improvement, many downloaded pages are almost impossible to read. Not a problem at NLS but sadly they only go up to 1900.

Increasing the size of the viewing window would help wiht the taking of screen shots.