manuals in pdf (resolution, compression)

On Sun, 2004-06-27 at 17:59, Tom Owad wrote: I tend to do that too. I'd much rather use my favourite image viewer to flick through images than deal with a pdf file, plus I can just put everything in a tar or zip archive if I do need to distribute as a single file. I've not reached a conclusion for what the best format is for OCRed data which may contain text and images. RTF is maybe the most portable, but no doubt it doesn't handle embedded imagery. MS Word is just a nasty format and none too portable either. I never thought I'd say it, but maybe wrapping the data up in *simple* HTML markup is the best way - at least then it is readable in a plain-text editor, and finding a machine with a web browser is probably easier than finding a machine with Word installed. Actually, I suppose seperate images can help here too as people can navigate straight away to what they want, plus they don't need to download the whole of a huge pdf file before they can start reading. Probably not. JPEG is lossy after all, so I expect it'll always do better than a non-lossy format. It's a tradeoff between size and quality - personally I'd always go for the quality for historical data. Actually, the BBC Documentation Project for the old Acorn 8 bit machines at http://www.bbcdocs.com is worth a look. They seem to do quite well in terms of getting both scanning and OCR volunteers. Only problem is that you need to be *really* sure that your OCR versions are good before you can risk taking the raw scans offline, which means having a lot of people doing a lot of proofreading. But OCR data will typically be a fraction of the size of raw image scans, regardless of what resolution / format you hold images in. Just keep raw image scans in an offline archive then just in case. cheers, Jules