Disk Drive Documents - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

6 Jun 1999

First of all, let me say that I'm in complete agreement with your notion
that the doc's don't have to be put out in only one format.  It's just that
I've been so extremely satisfied (ask anyone who knows me and they'll tell
you that's not easy!) with the PDF for document publication that any other
way simply hadn't arrived here yet.

With the Acrord32 program under Win95, you can print the pages you want and
skip the rest, you can search for specific words and phrases, and you can
print double-sided whether you have a duplex printer or not.  You can
generate extremely good-looking documents with almost no effort.  You just
can't edit them or such, and that's fine with me.  I've seen some truly
terrible PDF documents, obviously scanned from bad source documents or with
a really dirty scanner, and not cleaned up as I'd probably be inclined to do
if any of these documents turned out to be "bad" or difficult to read.  The
ones I've seen which were bad were posted PDF's of CP/M documents which I
probably ought to be glad I could get in any form.

What I would like to avoid, here, is getting in a position where we evaluate
the product on the basis of the tools used to generate it.  I use WIndows95
because it's a convenient tool for doing what I do with it.  I use DOS where
it's convenient and when I see a version of, say, LINUX that's got current
documentation I'll look at it again too, since there are supposed to be some
things that it does very handily as well.  I agree about the documentation
angle, but I don't agree that being free makes a product better.  It just
improves the price-performance comparison factors and helps with motivation
to try it.  I do believe that publishing the scanned documents as completely
as possible is desirable, so that when you run into that "see figure 8a on
page ..." you'll have that as well.  If you only need to print sheet 14 of
39, that's what you should be able to print, not the entire document when
all you wanted was the PLL's lowpass filter.  PDF allows all that.  If we
can get a consensus on other formats, I'm willing.  For now, we still need a
"home" for such documents as these.  The provider of this site space may
have something to say about format or about how many formats he sees fit to
house.

If this set of doc's can be scanned and put together into a useable form of
PDF document, then I see that as one relatively straightforward solution.
If there were a good PCL or PostScript viewer, widely distributed enough
that a substantial number of potential users would have it at their
disposal, that would also be useful distribution format.  If it could be
hammered into a Word97 document, that might be a candidate.  What's
important is that a large number of potential users have access to the
format that's chosen.

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Duell &lt;ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk&gt;
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
&lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt;
Date: Sunday, June 06, 1999 2:30 PM
Subject: Re: Disk Drive Documents

...
 > If, ultimately, the decision is made to serve
these documents up in linked
...
 > form rather than monolithic form, I'd submit
that it is still desirable to
...
 > be able to download the entire document as a
single object.  Some provision
...
   for that must
be made, and I don't think it's simple.

 Comments? 
Well, of course, nobody is saying that you have to distribute these
documents in only one format. And in many ways, the original scans (as
.gif or whatever) are closer to the original documents that something
that's been modified (OCRed, cleaned up, etc, so IMHO they should be
available somewhere.

I still think that a .pdf is not the best way to group a number of
scanned pages together. There are plenty of simpler, better documented,
solutions for this. Two obvious ones are .zip and .tar.gz . I've used
many ftp sites that will create one or other of those 'on the fly' - if
you want to download an entire directory, you can get
<directory_name>.zip (or .tar.gz) and it transfers one file to your
machine for you to unpack later.

But the ability to get only some pages from a manual I would think would
be very useful. Most times service manuals contain information that is
not that useful for a particular repair (things like the original parts
lists when parts haven't been stocked under those part numbers for at
least 10 years, things like the exploded diagrams when you have an
electronic fault, or the schematics when you have a mechanical fault,
etc). I don't like wasting network bandwidth if I can avoid it.

 Dick 
-tony