[time-nuts] DJVU and PDF

[Perry Sandeen]

List,

I’ve been trying to do a little desktop publishing on the side for 25 years and have learned a lot mostly by trial and lots of errors.

I was first multiple sand-bagged by MS.  Either going to a new operating system or changing to a newer version of word changed the format of completed documents.  (I couldn’t afford a Mac.)

When I retired in 2001 I started re-doing service manuals for Boatanchor receivers and related equipment.

I found that trying to use DJVU a total PITB.  It has become totally obsolete because of lack of support and the quantum leaps in computer technology do not now require minimalist graphics files.  Also other well supported competing graphics formats were developed.

I had a modest photo-editing program that came with my HP scanner and that worked so-so, but it was free.

Then I got a copy of Acrobat 5 after version 6 came out and it expanded by a magnitude of what I was able to do.  Besides creating PDF’s, I found I could take a non-encrypted PDF and both extract the pictures and the text separately.  For OCR work the program that came with my HP scanner was sufficient.
 
With the $100 Photoshop 6 program I took another quantum leap up for my B/W pictures.  Now I can change from lossy compression format to a loss-less one, edit and then when finished go to a more compressed format.

Now there are several free or low cost PDF file making programs on the internet.  There are also free PDF readers that are quicker, less bloated, and hacker free.

So what I do is create my documents in MS word and then convert them to PDF’s.  I tried the free Open Office but the word processor did not have an un-do function (which I ALWAYS need) that I could  find.  So it seems to me that the only cheap practical archival our time nuts ifo is to use the PDF format.

Regards,

Perrier