manx is dead?

On Wed, 2009-09-30 11:53:22 -0600, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: I've already seen that, though I'm quite sceptic about the Google stuff. They surely could OCR scanned PDFs, but I'm not sure if they will do that. (That'll bring more copyrighted material into the database, which previously wasn't available as /text/.) OTOH, indexing it after OCRing doesn't rework the PDFs to be more fancy, eg. add a real TOC around the former document, create bibloographic metadata or put the OCRed text nicely into the PDFs. I like Bitsavers a lot (as well as other spread sources of scanned material), but I see those PDFs only as a nice container to have a useable format up to the time where we can do /better/ with the scanned pages. Point is: We now can! The software is all out there, with everything being opensources and free as well. Until now, scanning documents was mainly about conserving the paper and being able to share it without snail-mailing around the stuff, which always also contains the danger of loosing it. But we can now really polish the stuff. That's /not/ a substitute for Bitsavers et al.--we need them. The PDFs over there are a perfect format for archiving the scanned pages. But we'd place generated PDFs next to them, containing real Table of Contents, biblopgraphy entries and possibly even Indices, among the OCRed text. I'd probably just hack my scripts (they're a bit specific for working on one special type of scan I did) and do some test as a start for a Manx2 :) MfG, JBG -- Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw at lug-owl.de +49-172-7608481 Signature of: Wenn ich wach bin, tr?ume ich. the second :