batch conversion to pdf

[Rik]

What about the ODT format that OpenOffice uses? It is part of the Open
Document Standard (open and ISO-compliant) and it is transparent (basically
a zip-container with XML files in it). Not really sure how well it deals
with complex scripts, though.

Rik

------------------------------
Rik De Busser
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology
La Trobe University, Bundoora 3086 VIC, Australia
www.rdbusser.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Aidan Wilson [mailto:a.wilson at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au] 
Sent: 27 October 2010 11:20
To: Andrew Cunningham
Cc: Gary Holton; resource-network-linguistic-diversity
Subject: Re: batch conversion to pdf

All true. But it's better than archiving in .doc format. Take the current 
situation with .docx as an example; Microsoft no longer support their own 
propriatary formats (.doc, .ppt, .xls, .mdb, etc) and to read them in the 
newest Office suite, you must download the 'compatibility pack'. The reason
is 
of course that other software engineers and manufacturers like Sun
Microsystems 
have reverse engineered these formats and make software that can read and
write 
to them easily. So Microsoft, understandably, is oriented towards control of

their formats - an aim that is largely incompatible with those of the 
archivist.

Adobe, by contrast, have released .pdf as an open standard format, making it

quite reliable for archive. To respond to your concerns about indexing and 
searchability, most pdf files (and pdf creation tools, printers, etc) encode

character information in a text file layer. It's not perfect (try to
copy/paste 
the text from a pdf and you'll quickly see why), but it will eventually
improve 
to the point where merely by printing to pdf, it will encode a text only 
version as a sublayer, making it just as searchable as .doc.

Alternatively, you could copy/paste the contents out of a word doc and
archive 
as a raw text file (in addition to pdf). It'd consume negligibly little
storage 
space.

-- 
Aidan Wilson

PhD Candidate
Dept of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
The University of Melbourne

+61428 458 969
a.wilson at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

On Wed, 27 Oct 2010, Andrew Cunningham wrote:

> I'm just wondering if PDF files are suitable as an archival format,
> since it is in essence a preprint format rather than an archival
> format
>
> This may be more of a concern with languages written in complex
> scripts (including Latin and Cyrillic script languages that need to be
> treated as complex scripts), where a PDF document will be
> glyph-centric rather than character-centric; affecting searchability,
> indexing and text extraction.
>
> Andrew
>
> On 27 October 2010 04:36, Gary Holton <gmholton at alaska.edu> wrote:
>> Here at ANLA we are often faced with the problem of archiving vast
>> numbers of digital files in proprietary formats, especially MS Word.
>> Does anyone know of a good method for batch converting from, say, .doc
>> to .pdf ?
>
>
>
>