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You probably have virtually no budget to purchase a good computer,
a scanner, and some high-quality optical character recogntion (OCR)
software. Am I right?
The beauty of documents printed in the ancient ways was that it's in
fixed pitch type, which makes it easier to scan. Of course, if the pages
are damaged in any way, then scanning doesn't work well.
As far as I can tell, there's no inexpensive or clever way out of your
situation. Companies that once handled large volumes of paper, such as
Glaxo, where I used to work, have spent millions of dollars on conversion
tools and electronic publishing systems.
Good luck.
-Mike
--
Michael Andrew Uhl, Lead Technical Writer (uhl -at- vislab -dot- epa -dot- gov)
Lockheed Martin, Primary Support Contractor to US EPA
Scientific Visualization Center
National Environmental Supercomputing Center (NESC)
U.S. EPA Environmental Research Center
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
Nyman, Rikki wrote:
> The following is a real problem -- it is not a joke! (Really!)
> Have any of you run into this problem?
> Our doc's department at AlliedSignal generates a gazillion reports for
> customers and agencies like the FAA that often incorporate material from
> our archives (pre-computer), from suppliers and vendors, or use original
> flight test data. Most of this material is not paginated, so the
> solution here is to print a page of page numbers (sometimes for
> hundreds of pages), waxing the page of page numbers, then cut out each
> individual page number with an exacto knife, drop it onto the page, and
> burnish it down. (This is an old department with a lot of legacy
> documents and people who have been here since 1965.) This takes so much
> time, it's crazy.
> Many ideas have been bandied about regarding the creative use of copiers
> and printers; those ideas I have suggested have been blown off as not
> being usable in this environment.
> The question is then, if you have to incorporate **a lot** of outside
> documentation into new reports, how do you do it? Is there a solution?
> Thanks!
> rikki
> rikki -dot- nyman -at- alliedsignal -dot- com
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