[R-390] Y2K Reprinting

[Barry Hauser]

Barry & Gang:


Whoooooaaaaa!

TIFF's can be very large depending on content and would be a colossal 
throw-back as far as the Y2K manual is concerned.

Way back, there were several army manuals that were scanned as images, 
text included and set up as pdf's but the pages were all images.  Some 
run in excess of 30 megs and much of the detail is grainy.   If you want 
'em, they're still available on the usual web sites.

When a few of us started off the Y2K back around the turn of the century 
(always wanted to write that ;-), I OCR-ed the entire '86 Navlex manual 
to start it off.  The Navlex manual was apparently created in some 
wordprocessing software and set up as a single column and the text was 
fairly crisp so it OCR'ed relatively well.  (Yes, many edits were 
needed.)  I included the original B&W line drawings and photos, mostly 
as place-holders for Pete Wokoun and Al Tirevold to work with.  Pete 
recreated both the line drawings (from scratch) and we shot new photos 
and he added fresh callouts and annotations.  Al pulled it all together 
in Acrobat with Adobe's authoring version.  The first version, complete 
with real (searchable) text, photos (mostly color) and drawings, was 4.3 
MB's.  The first (and last) revision wasn't expanded by much, mostly for 
corrections, somehow grew to about 14 or 17 MB's and that seemed to have 
something to do with the newer version of Acrobat that Al used to 
generate it.

Regardless, pdf is the format of choice, considering that it's a 
standard and is generally very efficient with mixed media -- text as 
text and graphics as graphics.  It has it's own compression logic.

There is no need to clean up any schematics -- they were fully recreated 
by Pete Wokoun in a professional drawing package he uses. 

The currently distributed version of the Y2K was being updated and 
refined by Perry and a few others of us a while back, but seemed to have 
gotten stalled.  However, it isn't necessary to reinvent any wheels.  
One thing in the wings were the remaining 12 or so photos that were 
completely replaced with color and with newly created callouts done by 
Pete.  I'm not sure where that's all at.  Perry may have most of it. 

Overall, it would be best if Al could put some time into it again.  
Whether or not he can, it should retain the work that was done thus far 
and the format should remain pdf.  Another consideration with pdf files 
-- they seem to be more reliable in downloading.  Some formats, when 
files are complex, may partially disassemble when downloaded, such as 
Word, etc.  where the user's own settings may re paginate and rearrange 
things when pulled up on the user's computer.

Forget about TIFF.  We're way past that. 

Barry






Barry Williams wrote:
> Tim,
>
> You have it confused with other formats. TIFF files are not bit 
> mapped. That is why I suggested them.
>
> TIFFs save the line attributes, so you can go back and edit points, 
> add points, etc. It is object oriented and I can't explain what that 
> means here. You'll have to look it up. The format also saves color 
> depth info for each color channel, so it is good for photos. TIFF is a 
> universal format with high resolutions if selected. TIFFs can be 
> editted in Photoshop and other layout programs easily. It is ideal for 
> schematics.
>
> LIke I said earlier, CAD would be the most time consuming way possible 
> to clean up the schematics over using an object oriented format. I've 
> done both.
>
>
> Barry
>
>
>> Barry suggests:
>>  
>>> You can convert to editable files (object oriented) without CAD. 
>>> That is one reason why TIFF files are desirable. CAD is taking the 
>>> hard way to do it.
>>>     
>>
>> NO NO NO DO NOT DO NOT MAKE TIFFS FROM THE WONDERFUL KH6GRT DRAWINGS.
>>
>> Converting to TIFF will turn a wonderful, zoomable drawing into a 
>> bitmap.
>>
>> DO NOT DO THAT.
>>
>> I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW AWFUL IT WOULD BE.
>>
>> There is so much detail in the KH6GRT drawings.
>>
>> To turn it into a bunch of chunky bitmaps would be so so so BAD.
>>
>> I do not know KH6GRT, but whoever is thinking about re-issuing the
>> Y2K manual should get to know him. He clearly knows how to make
>> really wonderful schematics using some CAD tool. Whoever is making
>> a re-issue should get the files straight from him.
>>
>> Tim.
>>
>>
>>   
>
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