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click here to visit and join the group. Or you may send contributions to jeff.ogden@umich.edu or gavin.eadie@umich.edu. |
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3. Creating PDF/A files
There are various tools to convert Postscript (or PDF) files into PDF/A format. Most of them are either difficult to use or expensive (or both), but Ghostscript (http://www.ghostscript.com/) is free and seems to do as good a job as any of them. There is a script in the "Documents and Files" section of this site that uses Ghostscript to convert Postscript to PDF/A. You will need to customize the script slightly for your local environment, look for the string "% Customize". You run the script with the command pdfa "some title" input.ps output.pdf Ghostscript is supposed to be able to read PDF files too, so it should be able to convert a PDF to PDF/A format. However, this doesn't seem to work well. Often the resulting PDF is mangled in some way. |
2. To copy or to link?
Our long term goal is to place most information about MTS into official archives such as Bitsavers.org or Deep Blue at the University of Michigan where they will have a long life. While we hope that this archive (archive.michigan-terminal-system.org) has a long life too, it is an informal, private effort with no official institutional backing and so it has no guarantees. There is also a 100MB limit on the free file storage space associated with this site. For these reasons it is best to view this site as:
When editing pages on this site, use the "Link" function or the Insert-->Link menu item to link to items stored elsewhere. Files and documents can be linked to "from the web" or uploaded to this site "from your computer" using the "+Add file" button from the "Documents and files" page. Photographs can be linked or uploaded using the Insert-->Image menu item when editing a page. |
1. Suggestions from an archivest
Here are a couple of suggestions from Nancy Deromedi at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library: From: Nancy Deromedi And the PDF, Best practices for producing high quality PDF files, has information about creating PDF/A format files.Date: June 30, 2010 2:48:01 PM EDT To: Jeff Ogden Subject: Re: first installment Hi Jeff, Thanks for meeting with us! It was great meeting with the three of you and the project sounds very interesting. . . . As far as the formats: The pdf's you sent are pdf's without embedded fonts. I tried converting the files to PDF/A but, could not. If you have Word files of the same documents there might be a chance that a new pdf can be created with embedded fonts. The jpegs are fine. If you end up scanning some original material that we might not have we would prefer a higher resolution image and preferably in TIFF format. Thanks again! Nancy Deromedi |
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