Re: MCM - Digest V1 #287

["Mary McCaw" <marymccaw@mediaone.net>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>
To: <aga-mcm@thekrib.com>
Cc: <nfrank@mindspring.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2000 12:35 PM
Subject: Re: MCM - Digest V1 #287

Neil told me that there are electronic tapes of some kind.  Perhaps you've
already discussed this privately, but is there any way of using these tapes?
Also, do you know for sure what Cogwell has and doesn't have?  I haven't
told him we have another publisher yet, so I could ask him about the above
when I call him which I was planning on doing tomorrow.  It would be nice if
we could think of some way to spare Eric some work.

Also, what should we do about maintaining an electronic file on TAG?  I just
okayed the final mock up this morning for the next issue and can make some
arrangements with the publisher.  I can keep a file on my computer.  Would
you like to maintain your own archives, Eric?

Mary


> On Tue, 2 May 2000 nfrank@mindspring.com wrote:
>
> > why not just create pdf files?
>
> PDF's are easy to create from a document source, i.e. a Word file.
>
> But we don't have document sources for TAG, right?  All we have is the
> physical magazine from the printers.  Not a lot to go on.  We could still
> make PDF's by creating a Word document from the paper magazine.  Two
> ways this can be done, and both are nasty:
>
> 1) Scan in the original magazine, and just make each page of the word
> document a "picture" of the original page.  The resulting document is huge
> and looks kind of like a FAX with the pages all crooked.  It does,
> however, preserve the original look and layout.  For an example of this,
> see a single page at
>
> http://www.aquatic-gardeners.org/page04.jpg
>
> Each physical page of TAG takes about 150k as a JPEG.  10 years of TAG,
> saved as JPEGs takes up maybe 1/2 a CD-ROM.
>
> When put into a word document or PDF, this expands greatly, perhaps
> tenfold!  Such documents would NOT easily fit on a CD-ROM.
>
>
> OK, method #2 is that we do all of step 1 above, but THEN take the scanned
> images (such as the example above), and reconstruct the text of the
> original article.  This is more complicated, taking sophisticated OCR
> software and lots of massaging so the text doesn't look like a ransom
> note.  As I mentioned yesterday, this takes about two hours per issue of
> TAG, whereas just scanning the article in takes about 1/2 hour and can be
> done while watching TV or talking on the phone). It generally does not
> preserve the original layout (which to me is actually not a problem,
> especially for archiving on the web).  The sparse illustrations are added
> back in as graphics, but the resultant file is TINY compared to the other,
> can be put on the web, edited, searched, archived as a PDF, whatever.
>
>
> I will definitely do the first part, because we'll then have a true
> archive of TAG in its original layout.  Last night I got volume 4 scanned
> in in 3 hours.  If I work steadily on this, I can quickly get all 9 and a
> half years done.  But the OCR phase I may either just do very very slowly,
> or save only for articles to be archived on the website.
>
>   - Erik
>
> --
> Erik Olson
> erik at thekrib dot com
>
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