Lyle Bickley wrote: Yes, but this doesn't perform any OCR, just uses PDF as a wrapper to the images. To the previous poster: I use Adobe Acrobat Capture and it has a great advantage and a great disadvantage: Pro: It OCR's the text -- you can keep it as-is behind the images to make the images text-searchable, or you can use it to fully convert the images into text themselves (massively massively reduces the size of the file while increasing font quality) Con: The OCR is only 90% accurate. You do a lot of touch-up. I can email you a PDF I created just recently with it; it took 600 DPI monochrome scanned text from the IBM Music Feature tech ref and converted (with 15 minutes of my help) into pure text. Email me off-list if you'd like a copy to examine. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

Sounds like an ideal thing for a distributed project. Give everyone who registers a few pages to proof read, combine into finished work. If you wanted cross-checking you'd just make sure that different people got different batches at different times, and diff the results. Gordon.

No, just scans of the pages and the OCRed text. One person with Acrobat Capture (or some other scanning and OCR package) would get it into soft copy, and then bundles of text (say a dozen pages each) would be sent to contributors. Gordon.

Possibly didn't make it entirely clear, but you'd send the OCRed text *and* scans of the original pages. Arty people could probably reconstruct the diagrams in a helpful way. Gordon.

jim stephens wrote: This has been mentioned many times, but JPEG was designed for continuous tone (colour photographs). It is poor-to-bad on B&W, text and line drawings. TIFF + G4 compression wins all the time for B&W and line drawings. I've not found a good solution for colour text and line drawings. JPEG still is not the right answer (it still hates those high frequency edges) but other formats I've tried all eat up inordinate amounts of disk space. (The original TIFF scans of some pages of some RSX-11 manauls I did weigh in at 24MB/page!). Antonio -- Antonio carlini arcarlini at iee.org

In article <200601252336.SAA11673 at Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> writes: I recommend that you use PNG instead of GIF -- better compression and better features. Besides, I thought the GIF patent had expired everywhere? -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

In article <200601272007.PAA21733 at Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> writes: Man, and I thought _I_ was a curmudgeon! :-) -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

In article <200601300303.WAA21446 at Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> writes: Shunning the new in favor of the old and reliable is generally considered curmudgeonly. 20-somethings look at me odd when I say I don't have a cell phone. (Frankly, I'm just not popular enough to justify it.) -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

der Mouse wrote: Ahh, but Mouse, anyone in The Tech Biz who clings to stubborn notions** is bound to become ill-tempered and filled with resentment very quickly. Doc ** Especially such notions as "It should perform as advertised" or "It should be user-serviceable, or maybe even just serviceable"

I can't afford to run a landline. Well, I can *now* thanks to free-ish VoIP providers. I can't justify spending that much money on a phone that I can only use in the house. Gordon.

You need to go reread the spec. GIF uses LZW, Lempel-Ziv-Welch, a significant extension to LZ. Neither of these appeared to matter from what I could see. If either is necessary, PNG may indeed be called for. Really? Who did that survey of graphics programs, where did you find it, and how did they miss mine? Or are you defining "still-maintained" to be a subset of "has acquired PNG support by now" (thereby making it mean something drastically different from what it appears to mean based on the words making it up)? It is not a direct application of Occam's Razor, no. But it is similar, in that it is a suggestion to use the less complicated over the more complicated when either will do. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

No, it doesn't. I was correcting the statement about GIF, not taking issue with the claim of better compression. Not always 8-bit; it depends on the number of unique colours in the input image. The input tokens to which LZW is applied can be as small as two bits per pixel. Do you actually know GIF? I'm beginning to think not. Neither is GIF, if the person who thought that all applicable patents have expired was correct. :-) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Not quite - the two "they"s (the one that gave and the one that took) are different. (Also, it wasn't GIF per se that was taken, but LZW, including other uses of LZW such as compress(1). GIF just happened to be defined to use LZW and nothing else, though it turns out to be easy to write GIF-compatible minimally-compressed files without infringing the LZW patent - easier than writing "real GIF" files with LZW, actually. When I was working for HASC I was one of two people who wrote code that does that - Google for miGIF and Hutchison (amusingly, (at least) one of the pages mis-credits me as "der Maus").) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

der Mouse wrote: LZ77 and LZ78 are the two basic families of most low-resource compression schemes. I used those terms specifically because most LZ77 implementations beat most LZ78 implementations. Yes, Terry Welch figured out you don't need to transmit the dictionary in LZ78, but S&S figured out at the same time that LZ78 can be made more efficient than LZ77 if you flag literals with bits (LZSS) instead of trying to encode them. I only write the above because it is *you* who didn't read enough :-) If you want to debate compression we can talk offline; but the simple answer is that the compression scheme used by PNG compresses smaller and decompresses faster than what GIF uses. The alpha channel is barely used, but the ability to have a picture with more than 256 colors is most certainly used. Prior to PNG it was compressed TIFF, which had so many variants (documented and undocumented, little- and big-endian) that it was a real PITA to read one from another program or platform. PNG is uniform across implementations. Web browsers (IE, Mozilla, Opera), graphics manipulation (The Gimp, Photoshop, others), OSS image libraries (ImageMagick, others). ...unless the less complicated can't do the task at all (like going beyond 256 paletted colors). -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

I never claimed otherwise. I merely pointed out it is a great deal more complicated. Is it? I thought the discussion was talking about colour line-art. In scanning, line-art means 1bpp, at least in my experience; I read "colour line-art" as implying 1bpp per primary, giving an absolute maximum of 8 different colours, well within GIF's range. This is not an answer to any of my questions. It sounds as though you actually mean something more like "PNG is in all graphics programs I think are important enough to be worth caring about" or maybe even "PNG is in all graphics programs I felt like bothering looking at". While there's nothing wrong with either, per se, it would probably be good to say what you mean. PNG most certainly is not in all still-maintained graphics programs. For example, I have an image displayer in live use (which I'm still maintaining) which supports nothing but pbm/pgm/ppm. Yes, of course. What did *you* think "when either will do" meant? /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

I mean that, in a scanning context, if you see a "line art" setting, it normally produces a 1bpp result. When the art in question is something like a woodcut or an ink sketch - which is what I suspect the line-art settings are more designed for - aliasing is not a problem in the same way that it is for something that, like an electronic schematic, is full of lines that really ought to be aligned with the pixel grid's axes. giftopnm has been around even longer. :-) No, it doesn't - but I wasn't claiming GIF support in "all still-maintained graphics programs", either. (:-? back atcha. :) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Richard wrote: You have very bad scanner software then. I buy Microtek scanners exclusively because the scanner software is extremely flexible and exact. If I want a 12-bit grayscale, I get it. If I want descreening with a 150 LPI matrix, I get it. Even with bad software, use everything that you can that you know isn't messed up. This is because most scanner software/drivers (that comes bundled with the scanner, at least) work in the scanner's native colorspace, which almost certainly exceeds yours. I always do level correction in the scanner software because does all the fixups at 40-bit (my scanner's depth) and I get a better result than if I had dumped into a 24-bit file and adjusted levels after the fact. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

Perhaps in general. But I've just been reading over the RFCs specifying it; I'm not yet done and it's already more complicated than LZW compression such as used by GIF. (The ideas are simple. The rendering of them into practice is not.) Perhaps I just have a different idea of complexity from you. Well, unless you need a non-1bpp alpha channel, or non-composed alpha, some such. Oh, I wasn't. Except in this particular case, and that conditional on the colour line-art being suitable for quantizing down to a sufficiently small set of colours. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 19:44:43 -0700 Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: Adobe Acrobat 3.0 had 'Capture' built in as part of the full price product. That was before Adobe adopted their 'tiered product' structure, where a lot of useful functionality gets put only in the expensive version. I would try to locate a copy of Acrobat 3.0 used if you can. Which can be tricky as the license number 'carries forward' so you would have to find somebody who hasn't upgraded. And I try to ALWAYS stay away from 'download versions' or expensive (more than $20-30) 'download only' software. You'll probably only be able to install it by downloading it onto one machine. I much prefer installable media, and sometimes if there's a choice, you can pay a little more and get the 'CD Version' mailed to you. For creating PDFs natively, I recently installed Aladin Ghostscript on my desktop machine at work. It's free and I created a .BAT file (which I then turned into an Icon I can 'drop' onto). It doesn't let you directly create PDF files, but you install a Postscript printer as one of your 'printers' in Windows with print-to-file selected, and print to Postscript (*.PS) image files, then run them through Ghostscript to turn them into PDF files. Of course, on a machine you have total control over, you can also install NetBSD or one of the Linux-based OSes, bring in scanner support to a program like The Gimp, then use Mozilla's composer to paste images into web pages, print the web pages to Postscript files, then use ps2pdf to convert those to PDF files. Gives you the ability to archive your images also as HTML-linked page sets, which means you can easily share them to the web. But several of these options don't give you the 'compressed all in one' archivedness of a PDF file. I used to use Acrobat 3.0 and really wasn't impressed with it's OCR 'capture' features. It basically 'captures' text content the PDF file so the 'images' are searchable. It has probably improved, and the hardware has certainly sped up, since I last used it. Full Acrobat is an expensive option, I specifically bought it years back to archive old paper documents to electronic form.