2 Jun
2005
2 Jun
'05
6:08 p.m.
On Thu, 2005-06-02 13:35:05 -0400, Barry Watzman <Watzman at neo.rr.com> wrote:
So what if it's not "searchable". Get a
clue: THE ORIGINAL PAPER MANUAL
WAS NOT "SEARCHABLE". But if you or anyone else wants it to be searchable
they are certain welcome to OCR the document, a capability which Acrobat
supports.
That's one of the main points. Somebody who scanned a document spent
some of his *own* time to ease things for other people. He'd give the
PDF around, but this data is only available to the people who get that
damn thing handed over. Having a nice set of scripts to automatically
also OCR the images (text quality doesn't matter--all most important
keywords will show up often enough so that *one* of them will most
probably me correct).
The people who don't like PDFs either have not
used Acrobat extensively or
don't understand the real nature of the prouduct. Acrobat allows you to
create an electronic document that can have as many features (or as few) as
the creator wants:
We're talking about PDF, not about Acrobat. I yet have to see Acrobat
running on vax-linux ...
-Page images
-Searchable, exportable, "copyable" text
Needs to be generated and handled somewhere.
-Fonts and graphics
-Printable
-Fully "rearrangeable" (re-sequence, add, delete, replace pages)
-Table of Contents (as hyperlink)
Needs to be created explicitely.
-Index
Dito.
-Movies, photos, sound and other multimedia objects
Those won't come out of my scanner :)
-Security control, passwords determining who can do
what
This is what I ban to hell.
And it and the documents it creates are
multi-platform: PC, Apple, Linux,
Sun, IBM mainframe .... virtually every computer platform in existence.
...but Acrobat isn't.
It's one of the best and most wonderful tools that
the PC world has ever
created. Sorry if it's proprietary, but sometimes quality tools are only
created by people who want to be paid for their work.
Maybe we'll get something even *better* for archiving old documents
and/or old *content* in general (right, think about disk images,
programs, ...)
It's not a tool problem, it's a conceptual thing that first needs some
clever concepts. If we always only try to fix little spots of it, we
won't ever get the big picture right.
MfG, JBG
--
Jan-Benedict Glaw jbglaw at lug-owl.de . +49-172-7608481 _ O _
"Eine Freie Meinung in einem Freien Kopf | Gegen Zensur | Gegen Krieg _ _ O
fuer einen Freien Staat voll Freier B?rger" | im Internet! | im Irak! O O O
ret = do_actions((curr | FREE_SPEECH) & ~(NEW_COPYRIGHT_LAW | DRM | TCPA));