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From:
John Albert Bickford Date: Wed Sep 16, 1998 3:55 pm Subject: Re: Start Your Own SW Web Site? | |
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Valerie has commented on some of the difficulties in getting SignWriting posted in an HTML document. It's a lot of work, since everything needs to be converted to graphic images. There may be another option that you might want to consider. We've used it very successfully on our SIL sites (e.g. //www.sil.org/americas/mexico), where we have a lot of special font requirements for spoken languages, using special characters that are not normally available in web browsers. What we have done is convert such papers to Adobe Acrobat PDF format. This preserves all of the graphics and layout, giving you a picture on screen of what you would get on a printed page. It is a one-step process. Basically, all you do is pick the Adobe PDFWriter as your "printer" from any Windows program (there is also a version for the Mac), and it creates the PDF file. The software to create such files costs about $180 retail, but we have sometimes been able to get academic editions for as little as $35. On the receiving end, someone wanting to read the file needs a special program that is available free from Adobe called Adobe Acrobat Reader. There are versions available for a wide range of operating systems: Windows, Mac, Unix, OS/2, among others. There's a little bit of work involved to install Acrobat Reader before you can read the files, but once that is done the system works very smoothly. There are lots of other sites on the web (including lots of government offices) that also publish things in Adobe Acrobat format, so it's worthwhile having it for getting access to that information too. So, I could see that this technology might make it possible to greatly speed up the speed with which you could get things published on the web. It's an option that is available to you. I'll be happy to describe it further if people have questions. Albert Bickford SIL-Mexico |
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