Evening all, QL Today arrived in miserable damp and grey Leeds today. I've read most of it already!
> On the subject of electronic vs. paper copy, electronic would certainly be > convenient for archiving... Yes, I have a point on that very matter too. As you may well know, for a number of issues "recently", I've been writing a series on Assembly language. What you might not know is that I'm working on a book where I've taken all the episodes and screen shots etc, and collected them into a book created in XML using Docbook and processed to give a reasonably nice PDF file. The book is configured as double sided, A4 sized pages, ready to print. Looking at it just now, it's 228 pages long - so 114 actual physical pages, assuming that there are no blanks - which there are. How big is the file, uncompressed I hear you wonder? 890KB. Less than 1MB in total. Now I realise that there are PDFs and there are PDFs and Geoff's comments about each page having to be a bitmap will indeed make the issues massive, but I'd be pretty sure that there's bound to be a way of getting actual text into the PDF. Some ways that I know of are OCR scanning the bitmaps to produce text - soemthing I'm having to look into for work at the moment. If I come up with something handy, I'll let you know. Another way is the fact that the files supplied to Geoff and Jochen (and Bruce?) and text based and could, most likely, be converted to Docbook XML format "quite simply" - at least, on Linux anyway. I'd be willing to have a go at doing an example QL Today in PDF format, just to see how it could be done and how big the resulting file would be. As they say on Top Gear "how hard can it be?" Just a thought. And, for those of us with a eReader that takes ePub files, guess what, Docbook XML source files can be output in ePub format too. That's another "project" I'm having to deal with at work. Wish me luck. Cheers, Norman. PS. Please excuse the following, it appears that by law, I must add it on to any communications going out from the company or from the company equipment. Guess which laptop I'm using to type this? -- Norman Dunbar Dunbar IT Consultants Ltd Registered address: Thorpe House 61 Richardshaw Lane Pudsey West Yorkshire United Kingdom LS28 7EL Company Number: 05132767 _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
