[Coco] Resolution, size and usability

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

Hi all,

I've only been marginally paying attention to the PDF-vs-DJVU 
discussion until I looked at my disk stats and saw that identical 
stuff is being uploaded in competing formats.

In two weeks, CoCo archives have exploded from 9GB to 45 GB -- more 
space than all 40 domains there used in 11 years of operation:
   <http://maltedmedia.com/images/du-apr-may-2009.jpg>

This is not a hosting complaint. It's an efficiency and usability 
complaint. You all know I'm happy to host CoCo files, but I do 
question an image-format experiment that duplicates large content 
with more large content. Bill's work is much appreciated, but how 
necessary is publication quality, high-res, color rasterizing of 
monochrome line art and text -- especially if it includes page-back 
shadows? Some publications to exceed 650MB.

This is an inefficient use of space, but more importantly, it's a 
barrier to use. Aside from bots (which are blocked as quickly as I 
find them), how many everyday CoCo enthusiasts are going to download 
documents that large? Even some DJVU items exceed 100MB. (Yes, the 
server does support Flashget-style multiple connections as well as 
resume, but even so... dialup or capped bandwidth, anyone? That's why 
this CoCo list has a 48KB message limit.)

Bill's done a lot of dedicated and much-appreciated work. For others 
in the future, though, I recommend optimizing each page to a usable 
size by using appropriate bit depth, color, brightness, contrast and 
resolutions settings -- before compiling the final publication.

I've been doing extensive archival scanning since the 3-pass days; I 
still have (and use for'art') my absurd 3-pass battleship-size 
scanner from 1992. It had its own dedicated SCSI card running under 
Windows 3.1 and took work to produce good documents.

On the other hand, modern scanner GUI control panels are excellent. 
Though it takes a few extra seconds per page, the settings really 
must be changed based on each page preview, producing a single PDF of 
each page at a time. For some pages, that means lower bit depth and 
monochrome. For others, it means changing brightness and contrast so 
the page itself is *white* (oh, yes!). Based on the results I've been 
looking at, the document size could have been 1/4 to 1/3 its present 
size simply by doing the latter -- avoiding the shadows of reverse 
pages which gets rasterized into hundreds of megabytes of garbage 
information. You can also tape on a black instead of a white backing 
panel to avoid this shadowing problem almost entirely from the start. 
Once there are separate PDFs for each page, they can be compiled into 
one (I use docPrint Pro).

Believe me, having scanned quite literally thousands of documents 
(and worn out a dozen scanners in the process), I can tell you a 
little extra work up front will produce a more legible, smaller, and 
ultimately more usable document.

Dennis




















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