Website Design Forum - nubee question

Author

nubee question

oscsolution@gmail.com

2006-03-14, 10:17 pm

i have a web site and i want the visitors to be able to download and
print pages from a book
unfortunatly the book is only available to me in printed pages
i was thinking of scanning the pages and providing a link to download
these pages.
would the visitors be able to print these scanned pages
is this a practical solution or there is a better way of doing this
there are about 1000 pages so i really can not see myself typing them
in a txt format unless i have to

Adrienne Boswell

2006-03-15, 3:17 am

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed oscsolution@XXXXXXXXXX writing in
news:1142389682.157901.59330@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com:

> i have a web site and i want the visitors to be able to download and
> print pages from a book
> unfortunatly the book is only available to me in printed pages
> i was thinking of scanning the pages and providing a link to download
> these pages.
> would the visitors be able to print these scanned pages
> is this a practical solution or there is a better way of doing this
> there are about 1000 pages so i really can not see myself typing them
> in a txt format unless i have to
>
>

1. Do you have permission to distribute the book?
2. If you do, you might ask the author if he can provide you with the
book in another form.

--
Adrienne Boswell
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

Chris Beall

2006-03-15, 6:23 pm

oscsolution@XXXXXXXXXX wrote:

> i have a web site and i want the visitors to be able to download and
> print pages from a book
> unfortunatly the book is only available to me in printed pages
> i was thinking of scanning the pages and providing a link to download
> these pages.
> would the visitors be able to print these scanned pages
> is this a practical solution or there is a better way of doing this
> there are about 1000 pages so i really can not see myself typing them
> in a txt format unless i have to
>

oscsolution,

1. Make sure you have permission to distribute the book, i.e. that you
are not violating the author's copyright. If you cannot obtain such
permission, stop. Instead, point your users to the original source.
2. Scan the book and feed the images into an OCR program (Optical
Character Recognition). Many scanners come with such recognition
software. The output will be raw text.
3. Spellcheck the text and proof read it for OCR errors, correcting them.
4. Decide on the format you want to use to present the material. HTML
is good for online viewing, but marginal for printing, especially if you
want to retain page breaks and numbering. PDF might be good, but is a
proprietary technology.
5. Drop your raw text into the desired environment, then manually tailor
it as required. For example, in HTML, add <p> tags as appropriate.
Decide whether to have one HTML page per book page or one HTML page per
book chapter, with appropriate titles. Proofread again, looking for
things like characters with odd code points, such as tabs, quotes and
apostrophes, or symbols for which entity references would be a better
choice. Correct as needed.
6. Style the text as appropriate for online viewing, with separate
styling for the printed page. The latter should match as closely as
possible the appearance of the original book.
7. Add citation information to every printed page and at the front and
back of the online book. This will allow someone who receives one
printed page to locate the complete original book.

Chris Beall

Mark Tranchant

2006-03-16, 6:16 am

Chris Beall wrote:

> PDF might be good, but is a proprietary technology.

....but also open, in that anyone may create software to read or write
PDF without having to pay royalties to Adobe.

--
Mark.
http://tranchant.plus.com/