IBM Quick Reference Guide - 1992

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:44:43 -0700 Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: Adobe Acrobat 3.0 had 'Capture' built in as part of the full price product. That was before Adobe adopted their 'tiered product' structure, where a lot of useful functionality gets put only in the expensive version. I would try to locate a copy of Acrobat 3.0 used if you can. Which can be tricky as the license number 'carries forward' so you would have to find somebody who hasn't upgraded. And I try to ALWAYS stay away from 'download versions' or expensive (more than $20-30) 'download only' software. You'll probably only be able to install it by downloading it onto one machine. I much prefer installable media, and sometimes if there's a choice, you can pay a little more and get the 'CD Version' mailed to you. For creating PDFs natively, I recently installed Aladin Ghostscript on my desktop machine at work. It's free and I created a .BAT file (which I then turned into an Icon I can 'drop' onto). It doesn't let you directly create PDF files, but you install a Postscript printer as one of your 'printers' in Windows with print-to-file selected, and print to Postscript (*.PS) image files, then run them through Ghostscript to turn them into PDF files. Of course, on a machine you have total control over, you can also install NetBSD or one of the Linux-based OSes, bring in scanner support to a program like The Gimp, then use Mozilla's composer to paste images into web pages, print the web pages to Postscript files, then use ps2pdf to convert those to PDF files. Gives you the ability to archive your images also as HTML-linked page sets, which means you can easily share them to the web. But several of these options don't give you the 'compressed all in one' archivedness of a PDF file. I used to use Acrobat 3.0 and really wasn't impressed with it's OCR 'capture' features. It basically 'captures' text content the PDF file so the 'images' are searchable. It has probably improved, and the hardware has certainly sped up, since I last used it. Full Acrobat is an expensive option, I specifically bought it years back to archive old paper documents to electronic form.