Formats for Scanned Documentation (was: Disk Drive Documents)

On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Tony Duell wrote: Unfortunately, that appears to be the case, even when the "Level 1 only" option is set when creating the postscript file from the PDF in Acrobat. I did only try this using the Linux version of Acrobat Reader, so it could be a platform or version-specific problem. After looking back at the output, the level 2 features that are included in the (supposedly) level 1 postscript seem to be causing the problems with Ghostview that I attributed to problems with G4 TIFF. That's what I get for trusting a check box... Easy! The ImageMagick 'convert' utility can output to many formats, including portable bitmaps. % convert 8ech1-3.tif +adjoin pbm:page%03d.pbm should do exactly what you want. The 2.2 MB TIFF file (containing 64 1496 x 2391 1-bit images) yields about 28 MB of portable bitmap files. Tarring and gzipping these files results in a 3.3 MB .tar.gz file, which isn't too bad. In this case, G4 TIFF might not have been worth the trouble. G4 TIFF is covered in the TIFF version 6 documentation, and the compression technique is described in more detail in a CCITT paper that is mentioned in the TIFF documentation. G4 TIFF support is also included in libtiff. In any case, I'm thankful for the efforts of list members who have put documentation on line, regardless of the format. Having the documents in an open, documented format would be great, but a little bit of format fiddling still beats "does anyone have documentation for foo?" and hours in front of a photocopier. -- Scott Ware ware(a)xtal.pharm.nwu.edu