When I worked for National Geographic I experimented with some other formats
for CD-ROM products, and I think .pdf is probably an acceptable choice. The
"ease of navigation" in Acrobat is somewhat dependant on how you create and
set up the .pdf publication. Simply having 115 cover images to click on
could be tedious. Since most of the issues would start as scanned TIFF
images, an additional step of optical character recognition (OCR) is needed
to make the text searchable rather than just looking at "pictures" of the
pages. An advantage of using Acrobat is most publishing software such as
Quark and Pagemaker will output to .pdf format which would save the trouble
of scanning and OCR proofing those recent issues that were created on
computer. There are also many tools avaliable such as AdLib eXpress OCR,
Adobe Capture, etc.
A while back I also started scanning Bricklines and got about 25 of them on
CD. Most of the effort was in scanning and then proofing the OCR results to
make the text searcheable. My plan was to donate it to the club, but I got
distracted with other projects. It is very commendable that someone has done
them all. Since Bricklin International is the copyright owner of the
Brickline magazines, hopefully this person has the club's permission to sell
the CD's on ebay, and hopefully would allow the club to sell them through
Bricklinalia or on the web site.
They would be nice to have as a complete set for historical and other value.
Unfortunately, some of the technical information in past issues was not
vetted and is absolutely wrong. A really useful project would be to create a
comprehensive up-to-date shop manual.
George Curley
> Some body has posted Brickline back issues on CD on Ebay, It's a bit
> pricey, $100, But if they all there they will take up much less room, I
> have bought "other" " professional quality" scan to PDF products and been
> some what satisfied, The scans are always good but navigation seems to be a
> bit of a pain, I haven't seen these yet but with today's technology there
> must be better ways of navigating thru an "E-Book' than Adobe Acrobat.
> BTW people that haven't mastered the use of the Caps Lock button really P
> me off, but this is a cut and paste and don't have the time to retype
> it.....
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