Archive file formats (RE: Archiving Stuff) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

25 Jun 1997

Whats wrong with plain old ascii text. 

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  From: Paul E Coad &lt;pcoad(a)crl.com&gt;
 To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
&lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt;
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  Subject: Re: Archive file formats (RE: Archiving
Stuff)
 Date: Wednesday, June 25, 1997 8:47 PM

 Kai,

 Nice initial stab at some standards.  I am a little concerned that this
 is a bit PC-centric.  I would like to make sure that those of us on the
 fringe (not using Windows machines or Macs) don't get left out.  This
 may mean lowering the standards to be a little more inclusive.

 Maybe these are all cross-platform standards, I don't know.  Can any of 
 the VMS/AmigaOS/TOS/whatnotOS people read and write all of these formats?

 I'm not trying to start a religious war.  I want to be able to make use
 of and possibly contribute to the archive.

 On Wed, 25 Jun 1997, Kai Kaltenbach wrote:

  Hey, figuring out standards like this is what I
do.  I recommend:

 JPEG for photo scans (brochures, ads, etc.)
 - It's the Internet photo file format standard  
 xv can be used to view these so Unix/X is covered.

 Compressed 1-bit, 300 dpi TIFF for schematics
 - Almost everything supports TIFF, including tons of shareware and
 Wang's free image processing add-on for Win95
 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/info/wang.htm)
 - 1-bit means monochrome (not grayscale).  Use JPEG for images.
 - Images should be 300 dpi, 8 1/2" x 11", i.e. 2550 x 3300 (don't worry
 about scanning white space, it takes no space at all when compressed)

 I'm not so sure that "everything" supports TIFF.  After a little looking,

...
  I couldn't even find a TIFF file to test with xv. 

 Is there a reason that postscript cannot be used?  Most of the schematics
 out there that I have seen have been postscript files.

  TXT for text documents that don't use
formatting
 - 80-column with carriage returns please  
 Text is good.

 RTF (Rich Text Format) for text documents that use formatting
 - WordPerfect, Word, WordPad, etc. will save in this format

 Is there anything under Unix which can read and/or write RTF?  

 Why not use postscript for publishing the formatted documents?

 --pec
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