RE: Off Topic: Seeking equivalent Mozilla feature

[Brian.Henderson@xxxxxxxx]

J R FOX wrote:

> ...you might be referring to the full Acrobat creator package ?
> That must be why even the "academic" version goes for about 3 bills.
> I do have GhostView, but have only given it the lightest use.

Yes, here at work I have the whole Acrobat megillah, and it is SO not worth the money they get for
it. I also subscribe to a PDF user group and most of the talk is about how to get around Acrobat's
shortcomings, which mostly involves using other also-expensive apps. For the price of the Acrbat
suite, it should do the things those additional programs were designed to do.

But for basic Postscript-to-PDF, Ghostscript (GhostView is the viewer/modifier app) works well (to
answer Martin's question). There's also PDF995, CutePDF Writer, PDF Creator...all do well enough.
The real trick with the freeware apps is to convert docs that won't be needing any editing
afterwards. Actually, that's the secret to ALL PDF...put everything in the Postscript beforehand.
Much easier said than done, though. I use a 20-thousand dollar app (Xyvision) to produce very
complicated PDF docs, that require just a little bit of Acrobatics to add some color to the
bookmarks (and when I figure out how to do away with THAT part...Acrobat WILL BE DESTROYED!...oops,
did I say that out loud?).


>btw, Brian, getting back a bit more to topic, is that project to scan the Xy manual still moving forward ?

I was afraid somebody would eventually ask me this. The short answer is, no...there is no movement
visable, but death is not to be assumed.

Actually, it's not the scanning part. The pages are already scanned as images. But I've never been
able to find a free (or cheap...because I'M cheap) OCR program that works well enough to make the
amount of additional cleanup/formatting feasible. I'm too lazy and get bored too easily to spend the
huge number of hours it would take to whip bad OCR into shape. I've started a few times, but I can't
sustain the effort. I could probably pirate something good, but I'd really prefer to not steal
(although, there ARE some things I'd have no qualms about stealing...food, if I'm broke and
hungry...medical care, pretty much anytime if I thought I could get away with it...the medical
industry is SO immoral these days).

But...your question reminds me that I haven't looked at OCR programs for a long time. With the speed
of change in the electronic world...there might be something workable now.

-B.H.