For publishers and other professional document creators, technology offers a wealth of opportunities for the re-use, re-generation and re-purposing of legacy material.

Legacy text material comes in many forms, principally out-of-print or previously published books, as well as manuscripts from typewriters and word processors, and magazine articles, academic journals and newspaper cuttings. However, regardless of its form, three factors are always present when dealing with legacy material; it is:

· existing printed material…
· unavailable in a digital form…
· whose content has some perceived value.

If the content of the legacy material is principally good quality text, and the material is to be re-published, optical character recognition (OCR), also known as text scanning, is a tried and trusted technological alternative to re-typing for bulk text entry. However, if the existing form of the legacy material is also important, and it is unfeasible or unnecessary to re-publish the material, capturing the documents with Adobe Acrobat may prove to be beneficial.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe's Acrobat family of software products lets users create, display and print Portable Document Format (PDF) files, independent of their originating software or computing platform, and regardless of whether files originate in electronic form or as hard copy. Legacy documents can be converted into a single, standardised electronic format suitable for distribution over networks, on low-cost CD-ROM disks, or via the Internet.

Acrobat Reader

Acrobat Reader, the software application which gives display and print access to PDF files, is available free from Adobe Systems Inc. (www.adobe.com or www.adobe.co.uk) as well as bulletin boards an numerous freeware and shareware websites. It is also bundled free with many new PCs and software applications.

Acrobat Capture

Acrobat Capture is Adobe's professional-level PDF production tool. It merges two important technologies - imaging and optical character recognition - with a host of exciting innovations, including multiple OCR language dictionaries and workflow management of jobs and projects.

Absolutely Scantastic Ltd uses Acrobat Capture for all of its PDF production work.

There are actually four types of captured Acrobat file, all compatible with Acrobat Reader, but with different strengths:

PDF image only: Acrobat files containing images of entire scanned pages.

PDF searchable image (exact): Acrobat files containing images of entire scanned pages, with an OCR (text recognition) process used to create files searchable for key words. The searchable nature of this type of file is extremely beneficial. Absolutely Scantastic Ltd recommends this file type for the majority of our Acrobat archiving projects.

PDF searchable image (compact): Similar to the PDF searchable image (exact) files detailed above, but used with scans of full-colour pages.

PDF formatted text and graphics: Compact and searchable files based on Acrobat's interpretation of the structure and content of a scanned page. Graphics are reproduced and bitmapped text is replaced with formatted text based on OCR. File sizes are the smallest of any Acrobat Capture PDF option, but, because the resulting page is an interpretation of the original scanned page, it need not necessarily be identical to the original page. Absolutely Scantastic Ltd does not recommend this file type.

The benefits of the Portable Document Format

The benefits of Acrobat PDF files - cross-platform availability, ease of distribution, small file size, searchability, intra- and inter-document cross-referencing and linking capabilities - are willing this file format many adherents. Industrial and commercial companies, government and not-for-profit bodies, regulatory authorities, library and archive services - all are finding innovative and profitable means to use this technology.

Re-generation and re-issue of legacy material

Documents which remain valuable and for which there is an on-going demand, such as library collections of journals or news clippings, can be scanned into a PDF searchable image archive, made available through a web server or FTP site, or distributed on low-cost CD-ROMs.

Archiving

Documents for which there is a low or negligible on-going demand, but for which there is a retention requirement for legal purposes, can be scanned and archived on low-cost CD-ROM or magneto-optical storage media. These documents preserve their look and remain accessible to any modern computing platform.

Distribution

Documents from diverse sources, such as product data sheets, white papers, specifications, catalogues and price lists, can be captured into an Acrobat library and distributed on low-cost CD-ROMs or via the Internet. This has the benefits of saving transport costs of large volumes of paper, ensuring that distributed documents are current, and that updates can be undertaken easily and swiftly.

Absolutely Scantastic Ltd's PDF conversion services

In addition to converting legacy documents to PDF documents, we can also work with existing libraries from imaging and document storage systems. This allows for conversion of TIFF, GIF and JPG archives to PDF files.

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