Many things

From: Randy McLaughlin <randy_at_s100-manuals.com>
Date: Fri Jan 28 12:53:47 2005

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Sokolov" <msokolov_at_ivan.harhan.org>
> Randy McLaughlin <randy_at_s100-manuals.com> wrote:
>
>> - Run the result through tiff2ps(1)
>> - and finaly generate a PDF with ps2pdf(1).
>
> Could you perhaps be a little more friendly to people like me and Tony
> Duell
> who actually _USE_ our classic computers for our day-to-day work,
> including
> viewing classic computer documentation, and make the PostScript available
> as well, i.e., with the last step omitted?
>
> PostScript is infinitely more friendly to Classic Computers than PDF. A
> PostScript document can be easily handled by someone who has no computing
> technology younger than 1985, that's almost 20 y old, not just 10. No
> graphical operating system required (how the heck is one supposed to run
> Adobe Acrobat on a vintage command-line OS with a VT100 terminal??), just
> use your favourite Classic command-line OS, be it ancient UNIX, VMS, RSX,
> or whatever, to send the PostScript file (with a command line) to your
> |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| PrintServer 40 (one of the original PS printers, same time
> as LaserWriter), and you are done. Can't do that with PDF. And the
> original PostScript prior to PDF conversion is always infinitely better
> than PostScript produced by turning PDF back into PS (which is what I do
> with all PDFs that come my way, because converting back to PS with a
> command
> line tool is the only thing I can do with a PDF file).
>
> One of the first laws I will pass after my revolution is that anyone who
> publishes or sends to another person a PDF file produced by conversion
> from
> PostScript but withholds the PostScript source shall be dragged into the
> public square and flogged till he can't stand. The recipient of the PDF
> file would simply need to call NKVD/KGB with the complaint.
>
> MS

You snipped all of my comments but only left my name, I only recomended
using tiff2pdf which saves a step and makes more efficient PDF documents.

More than that you missed the biggest point, PostScript is useless in this
case since the documents are stored as graphical images and cannot be used
on the classic computers.

I scan many documents and I can tell you that OCR'ing them and formatting
them so classic computers can handle them takes a huge amount of time. I
have better things to do with my time, including scanning more documents.

All of us that archive these documents would love it if someone would OCR
some of the documents and send the results back. It would save a huge
amount of space allowing for faster downloads and the ability to search the
documents.


Randy
www.s100-manuals.com
Received on Fri Jan 28 2005 - 12:53:47 GMT