I asked about TurboDOS, and John Lawson <jpl15(a)netcom.com> replied: TurboDOS for the 8086? I hadn't heard of that. I'm mostly looking for the Z-80 version, although an 8086 version does sound somewhat interesting. My theory has been that if it's worth photocopying, it's worth scanning, because even though it takes a bit more effort, it will help more people. I've been scanning DECsystem-10 hardware documentation lately: http://www.36bit.org/dec/ I'd be delighted to scan TurboDOS documentation and put it on the web, but at the moment I've got too much of a backlog. Cheers, Eric

John Lawson <jpl15(a)netcom.com> wrote: Since I'd like to share my philosophy of printed document preparation with a larger audience, I'm not emailing it privately. The secret (IMNSHO) is to recognize four things: 1) *NONE* of the available OCR is anywhere near good enough 2) This lifetime is too short to manually fix up the output of the OCR process. 3) Despite #1 and #2, it still is worthwhile making scanned images available in some form. 4) Even if OCR isn't good enough for document preservation, it's still worthwhile as a supplement since you can't grep images. Once you've resigned yourself to that, the solution is to scan the stuff at a reasonable resolution (typically 300 DPI), save it as TIFF Class F files using ITU-T Group 4 (T.6) compression, and run the stuff through Adobe Acrobat Exchange's "Capture" module in "invisible text" mode. The capture module will OCR the text to the best of its ability, but it will save the entire scanned image in the PDF file, so the document can be displayed or printed in all its original glory (and with all the original coffee stains, etc.). However, since the capture module does a fair job of OCR and saves the text in the PDF file with the "invisible" attribute, the reader can still use the search capabilities. The resulting document sizes are of course somewhat large, but not so huge as to be completely unmanageable. As an example, I have two DECsystem-10 manuals and a portion of a third currently available from one of my web sites: http://www.36bit.org/dec/manual/ Printed Pages Document Size Average Bytes Per Page ------------- ------------- ---------------------- 162 11.9 M 76,959 514 36.2 M 73,935 50 2.5 M 53,375 A 36-megabyte file admittedly takes a fair bit of time to download over a modem link. But the other option was for people not to be able to get it from me at all, because I don't mind spending hours to scan it once, but I'm not willing to spend hours making a photocopy EVERY TIME someone wants a copy. My web server supports byte-serving, so people running Netscape or IE with the Acrobat plug-in can browse the documents without having to download them in their entirety. So far the only people who have complained about it are people who didn't have any reason to need the files anyhow. I don't really understand it, but a lot of people seem to download everything they can get their hands on for no particular reason. I used to have some very large documents available on my web site in Postscript files that were available either ZIP'd or tar'd, and I specifically stated on the web page that the contents were the same, so please don't download both. An amazing number of people downloaded both anyhow. So now I only provide things like that in tar files. Eric