When we move our dear forum to a new host, we hope to build a vast library of Altec literature and documents that can also be stored there. A great deal of this already exists in electronic format thanks to the hard work of many Altec fans. This gives us a great head start.

I've seen a lot of bad scans over the years, the web is full of them. Fortunately for us, the existing Altec library does not suffer this. The quality is generally pretty good.

Ideally, the newly added documents will be converted into the PDF type, with clear graphics and searchable text. The ability to search the text is a huge benefit to the collection. Most of the documents are short enough that you really don't need help searching within them, but being able to search for something throughout the entire library will be a very handy. It will also allow the major search engines to index our Altec library and help folks find them.

The best approach is to scan the documents, preserve the graphics and images in a "high enough" resolution and convert all the text to ASCII for search before folding it all into the PDF wrapper. That not only makes the text searchable, but can reduce file size as well. Matching the look and layout of the original document depends a lot on the software and the skill of the operator. It can be done very well, with not too much effort.

Adobe Acrobat does this very well and can even overlay an invisible text layer over an image of the text. So you get the original image, plus text. Acrobat is expensive, tho, and I don't own a current copy. There are other software packages around that do very good jobs of scanning, converting and formating. If I end up doing much of the scanning, I'll be using one of those.

Much of the already scanned material can be converted to the same format.

If done well, this is a valuable library that can live on for centuries, long after we and the paper are gone. A gift to the future, but also something we can use.