[R-390] Y2K Reprinting

[Barry Williams]

Barry,

TIFFs can be huge. I wasn't saying to have them in that format for the 
manual. PDF is the way to go. I was referring to getting them into the 
computer and ready for output to whatever format.

No problem forgetting about that. Already forgot about it after offering 
to help in the beginning of the project.



Barry


> Barry & Gang:
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>
> 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
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