Re: Great news from Apple Computer themselves regarding manuals

[Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>]

Supertimer writes ...
> 
> Wouldn't a whole page graphic with enough resolution to
> be readable take up a lot of disk space?  One page would
> be a cinch, but 500 pages can quickly bog down a web
> server account.
>

     Yes; my 'inside the matchbook cover' estimate at a single
resolution setting is around 8MB. The resolution required would vary
somewhat depending upon page content; so, with some diddling, we might
get by with something closer to 5MB for a 500-page manual. (These are
rough guesses based upon some PDF files.)  When you consider the manuals
for just the IIgs, you are talking about quite a lot of storage-- much
more than the typical web server account delivers.
 
     OCR-scanned text would be more compact; but, someone would have to
fiddle with the scanning for each page and proof-read and correct the
result. Non-text diagrams and pics would need to be scanned separately.
Extracting and organizing the content of just one manual could take
weeks. When you were done, the result would still be a fairly large
file, especially if you want the stuff to be available for on-line
viewing.

     One way to save quite a lot of time would be to obtain the source
Text and graphics files for the manuals from Apple.

     Whatever, we will have a lot of stuff to deal with plus a few
issues regarding accessibility-- for example, do the manuals need to be
directly viewable on-line? And, we will be looking for a place to
maintain it. Perhaps Ground would be interested, especially if we
collected donations toward a larger drive.



Rubywand