Old Typesetting files

[Zane H. Healy]

>Interesting.
>
>This reminds me very strongly of "Travels in Computerland" by Ben
>R. Schneider.  He went through this sort of struggle back around 1973,
>trying to figure out how to convert several thousand pages of
>reference book into a computer database.  The eventual solution was to
>type it and then scan the typed pages.
>
>Nowadays the answer would be different, but it's curious that it
>hasn't changed as much as I would expect.
>
>        paul

I think part of the problem might be a bit of lack of understanding 
of the problem.  I'm waiting for more details, but from the initial 
details I've gotten it sounds as if they view formats that are as 
little as 8 years old as being unreadable.  I suspect part of the 
reason they don't think it can be OCR'd is due to the page layouts.

Of course then there is a book that I provided the computer support 
for.  It started on a Kaypro PC (something like an IBM AT clone), and 
finished on a P90 laptop.  In the end a 1200dpi printer had to be 
purchased as the book was written in WordPerfect (mostly WordPerfect 
for Windows 5.2, which is the format it was finished in), and by the 
time it was finished no one could handle the format.  The book was 
printed at 1200dpi and scanned, then the scans were used for the 
printing.  The big issue was the high degree of formatting (it is 
almost totally in columns, and somewhere over 1200 pages), and yes, I 
tried to get the book shifted to a more modern program back when it 
could have been done.

			Zane


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| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
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