Someone wrote about scanned documentation on highgate.comm.sfu.ca:
> There is no free or shareware viewer for that format I can find. If you
> have one it can likely save the file as jpg of gif. Why an oddball version
> of TIFF was used is beyond me.
Kevin replied:
> David Gesswein does the scanning, and I do the site maintenance. I don't
> have the time (or resources or scanning experience) to do both.
Geez, I can't believe people are bitching about scanned documents being
available for free, just because they have to go find a suitable viewer.
Although I guess it shouldn't surprise me, since I get the same complaints
about my own web site.
I looked at these docs, and they are in completely standard TIFF Class F
Group 4 encoding. Any program that purports to handle TIFF bitmap files but
can't handle these is simply broken. I haven't researched the availability
of TIFF viewer programs that thoroughly, but I've found that xv, ImageMagick,
and Gimp all deal with them without difficulty.
Group 4 fax coding is exactly the correct coding to use. GIF files of the
same thing would be much larger, and JPEG files would either be larger or
blurrier. I can't believe people keep wanting JPEG files; JPEG is designed
for continuous-tone photographic images, and absolutely sucks for line art.
The only more efficient coding for line art that I'm aware of is JBIG. It's
only 10-20% more efficient, and almost no one has a JBIG viewer.
The scanned documents on my web site are also in Group 4 format, but they're
embedded in PDF files rather than TIFF. This provides several advantages,
including that *all* PDF-compliant viewers can handle them, and that the PDF
file can optionally contain "hidden" OCR'd text as well, so that it can be
text searchable. Nevertheless, I get lots of complaints about using PDF, and
my standard answer is that anyone that doesn't like is welcome to go f#_at_$
themself.
If you like, I can provide a Unix program to convert multipage TIFF Class F
Group 4 documents into PDF documents [*]. But I supect you'd get as many or
more whiners. If you have sufficient disk space, you could provide both
formats. Personally I don't see the point in going very far to accomodate
the wishes of lazy people, so I provide only the PDF format. I used to
offer Postscript and TIFF formats for a few documents, and the result was
that lots of people wasted my internet bandwidth by downloaded all three
even though it was clearly stated that the content was identical.
> David scanned and offered them in this form, and if it means that I have
David gets a hearty thanks from me, and so do you for making them available.
Eric
[*] Adobe Acrobat Exchange is apparently deliberately crippled to prevent the
import of multipage TIFF files, since they want you to buy the much more
expensive Acrobat Capture program if you do bulk scanning. I just use my
own program to convert TIFF to PDF, then use Exchange to do the OCR.
Received on Sun Apr 04 1999 - 18:52:52 BST
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