11 Oct
2005
11 Oct
'05
8:39 p.m.
Paper may
actually not be totally out of the question. With decent
printing technology you can get about 75dpi with fairly clear
readability.
As we've flogged many times before, "Which printing
technology"? Laser printer toner has characteristics that make it
unsuitable (such
as the way it'll transfer from page to page when pressed tightly).
Ink jets are soluble. Dye sub? Wax transfer?
It doesn't have to be anything currently available in a mass-market
computer printer (which you didn't explicitly say, but all your
examples are).
Not cheap, not easy,
Nothing for storing that much data with anything like the durability
ink-on-paper offers will be, I suspect.
not even reliable - and considering you'd need to
develop new forms
of paper-reading equipment and software to retrieve it.
New equipment? Hardly, not as long as some kind of decent-resolution
digital photography is available. Software? Perhaps, but not very - I
have a 300dpi scanner next to my monitor, and I believe I could cobble
something together in no more than a few days to turn (scans of) such
pages into a big array o' bits. (And from there, it would depend on
the encoding algorithms, which is why I specifically mentioned
documenting them on directly human readable pages.)
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