Scanning question (Is destruction of old tech docs a moral crime?)

Yes, and although it rarely happens, and is just shrugged off as "something didn't go right with that scan", ARTIFACTS can sometimes occur. Oversimplifying a bit, . . . consider the output of a Laserjet "MINUS" or a Laserjet-Plus (CX engine) as being a grid of squares with a circular dot inscribed in them, with open areas in the corners of each square. A LaserJet II (SX engine) is a grid of squares with a dot whose boundary circumscribes the square (and the dots OVERLAP!) Thus, the "newer" model could produce a very solid black, but the earlier one could not give a solid black. If scanning the earlier output at 300DPI, it is POSSIBLE to get the alignment JUST WRONG enough to line up with those gaps in the corners of the squares! VERY RARE, and another scan, with the original moved a thousandth of an inch comes out just fine. I have worked PLENTY with documentation printed on dot matrix printers. And ~30 years ago, some would attempt to do "DeskTop Pulishing" using a 7 pin dot matrix printer! It's normally OK for text, which has a fair amount of implicit context. A bit less so with proper names, where spelling is not previously known. And when it's hard to tell the difference between a '3' and an '8', you have a problem. I'm often grateful to find ANY documentaaion, even if it is barely readable. But, it is a JOY to get high quality scans, or to work from original typeset materials. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com On Sun, 21 Jul 2019, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote: