1 Jun
2005
1 Jun
'05
10:28 p.m.
> Please do not waste any time making new PDF
documents,
On Wed, 1 Jun 2005, Eric Smith wrote:
Please don't waste any time complaining about PDF
documents. In many
cases, you're lucky to get the data in any form at all.
D'OH!! :-)
I recently saw the most impressive PDF I've ever seen -- on
www.mscdirect.com, a catalog page -- presented as PDF -- had
hyperlinks on product catalog numbers to the "shopping cart"
mechanism. QUite nice.
While I do believe PDFs are often abused and partially deserve
their bloated reputation (Adobe pushes them too much) they can be
used properly as containers for multiple-component documents.
It's unfortunate that it's so much work to hand-type or "OCR" old
documents to produce PDFs as lovely as MSC's.
I've offered to help out with automation to produce PDFs or other
efficient containers for a thousand or so scanned pages (TIFFs) to
be bundled into chapter-sized chunks.
(It's an American Motors factory parts catalog -- a year's
automobile product line broken down into parts down to the
solitary screw.)
Does anyone have any references to cookbooks/how-to's on how to go
about doing this sort of thing?