Re: Computing Editorial (please read)

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Lee Hart wrote:

>Paul Schlyter wrote:
>>> DON'T DO THAT ANYMORE!!! Instead use a scanner + OCR software. Yes,
>>> the OCR software has its flaws, and you'll often have to proofread
>>> what the OCR software produced. But in my own experience, OCR'ing
>>> printed pages and reformatting + proofreading them afterwards is some
>>> 4-5 times faster than typing in all of it by hand.
>
>CBFalconer wrote:
>> A lot of stuff is available scanned,  but locked up in PDF files
>> etc.  It would be useful to have a means of extracting that scan
>> and passing it on to OCR software.
>
>Exactly. Manuals from the early days of microcomputing are often in bad
>shape, printed with cheap printers, and full of typos and unreadable
>text. They include source code listings that must be rendered perfectly,
>or they become worthless (can't mix up ohs and zeros, ells and ones).
>Formatting is often vital (exactly how many spaces go between these
>quotes?).
>
>It helps if the text has working hyperlinks, so you can find
>definitions, and use the index and table of contents. Finally, you not
>only want to be able to read the document, but if there is source code,
>you may want it in machine readable form so you can actually load and
>run it.
>
>So, I've done whatever is necessary to get the old manuals into usable
>form. Generally, it gets scanned, then OCR'd, then proofread. Often,
>whole sections need to be retyped because the automated conversion is so
>bad.
>
>I generally make it an HTML file. This saves space for downloading or
>disk storage compared to some graphic format like PDF. You can use the
>hyperlinks to jump around in it. And, the code segments in it are plain
>ASCII, so you can cut and paste them into a program to be executed on
>the real hardware or an emulator.

Not so.  PDF files are big if they contain graphic scans, but not if
they contain text.  And, of course, you can control pagination with
a .pdf, but are at the mercy of an HTML renderer with HTML.  And
it's much easier to download a .pdf than 75 HTML pages, if you
break it up into pages.

-michael

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