Subject: Re: Manuals being scanned

Cameron Kaiser wrote: I suspect that the <stream> encoding in the PDF's probably needs to be deciphered to see the text. I also suspect there may be a variant that has plain text. Note that both tiff and postscript can be encapsulated in pdf's with very little modification and in the case of some postscript files, the plain text will be visible and ascii readable, and in others it will not (such as EPS). The original documents in the thread seem to have been touched and perhaps OCR'ed by Acrobat 6. I used Acrobat 6 to capture documents, and found a similar problem when I used it, and had to turn off the "document" capture and change to picture capture options. When I did that, the size increased dramatically, so I ended up abandoning that format. After a lot of experimentation, I frankly have not found much to change about how Bitsavers is encoded and stored. At a future time someone may OCR the archive, but right now I don't think that the resources exist to scan and store the documents in a fashion that current OCR software will work. But the black and white images work for humans, so sometime soneone may get an OCR package, modify it, and make a run at the database. Jim