manuals in pdf (resolution, compression)

I have a 2.8GHz Intel box running Debian at work and that works quite nicely (firefox and xpdf IIRC). I also have a 450MHz Intel box running Windows and Acrobat 6 on that runs like something that died quite a while ago :-) For anything current, I expect all three to be available. For anything classic, you cannot expect more than a text editor to be around. But I don't expect to read schematics on a WT78! The Adobe stuff you pay for (although the reader is free on a few platforms). The specifications are freely available and I've not seen anything that says you cannot implement your own reader. Perhaps they want you to pay if you implement a writer but I expect not since Eric Smith's tumble is free. You can edit a PDF but not quite in the same way as you would edit a word processed document. You can replace characters within a line but there seems to be no "wrap" to the next line and so on. It's OK (if somewhat painful) for the sort of OCR-error-correction that you have in mind. Obviously you cannot edit images (without extracting them, mangling in an image editor and re-inserting). I've scanned bucket loads of docs (small buckets compared to others, but enough to fill 10CDs or so - probably 100 docs). That was not too bad with an automated sheet-feeder and a decent scanner that would drop a file onto a share. A bit of post-processing (convert to G4, check for missing pages) and you are done. Even that probably took a day per doc on average. Throw in OCR and you would magnify that by maybe a factor of three. Throw in proof-redaing and you'd go mad. It's trivially easy to miss errors so you would really have to have each doc verified by multiple people. And then you need to measure their error rate, perhaps by injecting deliberate misatkes (did you see it, or have you had to go back to look) and verifying that they spot them. On top of that, if you go to all the trouble of scanning stuff and verifying it to a certain extent (and putting together a checksum in case something goes wrong), surely you need to have some kind of backup for when the disk dies? (I've spent the last 24 hours recovering a dead 40GB drive and the previous 24 hours - while waiting for the replacement to arrive - wondering just how dead it was and how much I'd not yet backed up ...). I keep everything I've put any real effort into on two CDs and I try to get it hosted on at least one site somewhere. Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org