Archive file formats (RE: Archiving Stuff)

From: Paul E Coad <pcoad_at_crl.com>
Date: Wed Jun 25 20:47:00 1997

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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