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From: Bernd Paysan <paysan@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>
Subject: Re: Publishing Scholarly Work on the Web -- opinions?
Organization: Bernd Paysan, 81477 Muenchen, Germany
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 02:15:23 +0200
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Message-ID: <3245D69B.763DBAF8@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>

Erik Demaine wrote:
> : aren't there software tools that can convert PostScript into HTML?
> : if not, someone could make some dough creating such a tool.
> 
> Actually, that's pretty much impossible.  If it is possible (I'm not familiar
> with the latest HTML), then it would have to look really ugly.

To some extent it is possible. Even ps2ascii extractor exists. At least
you can OCR a ps document, and exctract the unrecognised parts as gif,
an there's your HTML document. The better solution certainly is to
convert the document at a higher abstraction layer, e.g. LaTeX or any
decent word processing format.

> I have another technicality question that is very important: where are you
> going to get the diskspace?  It seems to me that there're going to be a huge
> number of potentially large (in terms of diskspace) papers.  Are you planning
> on discarding them after a while?  I think this would be very bad.  This means
> you going to need some continual funding to keep getting more disks.

A paper, mostly written text, doesn't take much disk space. My thesis
paper (about 70 pages) is 120k compressed postscript. With current disk
prices, this is below 2 cents (if the price dopping rate sayed the same,
this is the price for storing it forever). What's the price of 70 sheets
of paper? So if I can afford storing the document, I can't afford
proofprinting.

> And if we're
> going futurist, why not say that _someday_, there will be portable monitors
> (essentially) that are as nice to read as paper?

Portable monitors (leading edge) are better to read than non-portable
CRTs today (portable only for body-builders ;-). Remeber the first
"portable" computers about 10 years ago?

-- 
Bernd Paysan
"Late answers are wrong answers!"
http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~paysan/

