Afternoon Wolfgang, > That should take all of 6 minutes: > > 1 minute : take the staples off & put pages them in my scanner. > 2 minutes scan even pages > 2 minutes scan odd pages > 1 minute prepare PDF... > > I could do that when QL Today gets here. I could do that as well with my scanner here, or even better, at work with the "big one". However, that would build a PDF with bitmaps for pages - be they PNG or TIFF etc - and we want to avoid that.
To me, a PDF file containing magazine text, or book text etc, should be: * Searchable - bitmap pages are not. * Copy & paste'able. Again, bitmap pages are not. * Small! So, we only need the scanner to get the pages as images for an OCR to extract the text - I'm not sure how an OCR would treat the two column arrangement on some pages - and then use the text to build a new PDF file that is all of the above. As I mentioned, my 228 page pdf book is currently 890Kb in size, so a copy of QL Today with 40 pages could be somewhere around 160KB which is pretty good even if you are running an internet connection on a 56K modem! (I used to download the entire binary and source discs for C68 from Dave Walker when I was the Quanta C68 Librarian on a 1440 Modem. That was a task for Sunday afternoons when dial up was cheap rate!) I wonder if it's possible to get hold of the entire set of (possibly unedited) source files, in whatever format they come in, for one issue of QL Today just to see how much work is needed and how big the finished PDF will be. I have experimented with Open Office and it makes the use of mixed single and double column page formats - as in the latest QL Today - simple. Design the document on single page layout, select the text you want in two columns and Format->Columns and pick two, set the gutter size, OK. Job done! No need for fancy publishing software, and a PDF can be created by clicking one button. And the generated PDF is all of the above as well - searchable, cut & paste etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Geoff and Jochen *must* create a PDF, I'm simply saying that it should be possible and the created files will not need to be bitmapped pages and extremely large with poor quality. Cheers, Norman. _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
