On 12/30/2011 10:30 AM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
In<[email protected]>, on 12/30/2011
at 08:23 AM, "Joel C. Ewing"<[email protected]> said:
First thing I do with new equipment/appliance manuals is either find
and save an on-line pdf version
Why? I know that in some cases PDF is all that's available, but
certainly not in all.
I want a form that preserves for my personal use, and has the ability to
recreate if necessary, the original multi-page documents for human
viewing. PDF was designed with precisely that in mind and does it very
well. I want a format with a proven track record of continued support
over an extended time period on multiple hardware platforms and
operating systems. The PDF specs are openly available, free PDF readers
are available for multiple environments from multiple independent
sources. Ditto for free print-to-PDF converters, and direct PDF
creation support is now built into many applications as well.
There are other formats that are useful or even "better" in specific
environments, but nothing at this point is as ubiquitous as PDF, and I
have no idea what systems I may be running ten years from now.
If you can get a text-based PDF document from the original source, that
would certainly be preferable, as that allows text searching capability.
But, if all you have is a hard copy, none of the current
freely-available OCR tools come close to preserving the original
document as accurately as image-based PDF, unless you have the time for
extensive manual editing. Bitsavers.org uses a modified archive
approach that uses higher resolution to allow possible future OCR; but
compensates for higher resolution by using black/white threshold images
that sacrifice quality of embedded document illustrations. I prefer to
go with lower resolution adequate for human reading and preserve gray
scale, and even color, where its use is significant.
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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