Re: Scanning Xy3 manuals

[Brian.Henderson@xxxxxxxx]

I really wasn't ignoring you guys. I've been sick for more than a week.
If it wasn't Swine flu, then it was the strangest cold I've ever had.
Ah, who knows...mutations are (probably) accelerating.

As for digitizing the Xy3 manual...I lost a little steam on that
project. I started on the Xy3 manual, then moved to the Xy4, and never
got back to 3 again.

Here's the job as I see it (I know some of these points have already
been gone over).

The biggest problem with a book-to-digital project is that to do it
right you have to end up with a PDF that was created from a text file,
not a PDF that's essentially a series of single-page graphics. Even with
Nathan's idea about accompanying text behind the page images ( I never
heard of that...makes sense though), the files are still going to be too
big for the web. And you still have to manually create the navigation
(bookmarks) and links (I don't know if there are any programs that can
automatically create links from scanned pages...can't imagine how that
would work). One advantage though: you get something that looks just
like the source material.

Before I had OCRd and composed the Xy4 book I uploaded the scanned pages
to XyWrite.com, with a bit of added navigation. But it was ugly,
unwieldy, and HUGE (high resolution improves OCR).

So...you scan the pages and OCR into text files. And either format using
something like Xywrite or Word (I myself would never consider using Word
- hate it - and I don't actually know how to use Xy that way well enough
to turn out something pretty), OR you (as I did with the Xy4 book)
markup the text with  (XML, nowadays) and run it through a
composition engine. The latter method is the most labor intensive, but
produces the best results. The biggest drawback to this method is that
the end-result is not going to look like the original (at least not
without way more work than I'm willing to put into it). I've had some
criticism along those lines, but I just don't see the validity of making
sure that the people who're used to using the original book are not
put-off by a different format. I can understand the impulse. But it
sounds like religion when folks talk like that.

Besides, I think my version of the Xy3 manual looks much better:
http://www.xywrite.com/man/xy3_manual_ak-02.pdf

I have access to a composition engine, and am willing to just continue
the Xy3 project (now that it has been re-awakened). It's definitely a
big job (maybe not as big as Robert considers it to be...with the right
tools at least), so I probably wouldn't turn down help. Although, as I
see it, the only practical help would be delivering the plain text to me
(yes, a lot of work just getting to that point). Anything less is
probably too complicated and error-prone.

Anyway, I'm mentally gearing-up.

-BrianH.