Cosmos - A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe

During my sabbatical period I put myself to the very laborious task of editing Humboldt’s masterpiece “Cosmos - A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe” (Vol. 1) starting from a low-quality scan of a English translation of the original book (written in German). I applied an Optical Character Recognition software to the scan to generate a .txt which I then painstakingly converted into LaTeX, added several figures and illustrations in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons and generally tried to make it more accessible for a modern reader.

I’m making the resulting PDF available here. There’s still a lot of cleaning to do, but I don’t have the time to do it now.

Here’s an excerpt of the PDF, showing the introduction. The actual PDF is too large for git and git-lfs does not allow me to push it as well since this repository is a fork.