17 Sep
1999
17 Sep
'99
5:40 p.m.
Well, I like my scanner because it has a sheetfeeder and because it's legal
size, but, alas, it's only capable of a limited range of formats. After
all, I've had the thing for nearly ten years. Now, if you have a way to
massage the old style TIFF (targa) files into something better, perhaps that
would be the thing to do.
A lot depends on what requirements the TBD web host will have, and I'll
perhaps hold off until a site is found.
OTOH, I did sort of allow that since Hans Franke is going to be at the VCF,
though I'm not, I can arrange to get this stuff hauled out there for him by
someone from here who's going. I will have to see whether he's willing to
get this stuff scanned and appropriately compressed, then made available via
the web.
Wait and see . . .
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Smith <eric(a)brouhaha.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Friday, September 17, 1999 6:57 PM
Subject: Re: Intel OS DOC and SOURCE
"Richard Erlacher" <edick(a)idcomm.com>
wrote:
> If there were a web site which would accomodate the many thousands of
pages
> involved here I'd consider scanning the stuff
and forwarding the bitmaps
to
> whoever wants them. Now, keep in mind that a
typical TIFF of a printed
page
> in single-bit format is about 1 MB in size, and
we're looking at a
1-2'-high
> stack of paper with both sides printed in most
cases. LEt's see. . . a
ream
> is about 1-3/4" = 500 sheets . . . let's
say 10 reams . . . so we're
looking
at 10 GB,
right (GAWD! . . . I hope I've miscalculated!)
No, for text and line art, just use TIFF Class F Group 4 compression.
It's lossless, and for typical pages at 300 DPI it's only about 50K.
Intricate pages somtimes wind up around 100K-120K.
And although not all software can deal with that format, the Group 4
fax compression is one of the native formats for PDF, so I now supply
all of my scanned documents as PDF files. For a few examples, see:
http://www.36bit.org/dec/
Yes, I know that some people hate PDF format, and that you can't read
them on a Commodore 64 or PDP-11/05. To which I say, too bad. I got
many more complaints about other formats. Some people even wanted text
pages in JPEG format, which is just about the worst conceivable format
for them, since JPEG is a lossy format designed for continuous tone
images.
I've hacked a version of the imagepdf program from Thomas Metz's PDFLIB
to directly import TIFF Class F Group 4 files into PDF files without
decompressing them, so that it's not necessary to buy the $300 Acrobat
program from Adobe.
Eric