Re: [Leica] Film is Archival

[Jeff S <four_season_photo@yahoo.com>]

>Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 17:26:57 -0700
>From: Eric Welch <eric@jphotog.com>
>Subject: Re: [Leica] Film is Archival
>
>Unfortunately RTF won't do it. My work is also in
>Quark, InDesign, and PDF. Not to mention books. I've
>helped produce about 50 books in the past three
>years. Well, PDF is pretty safe in the future, but
>it's not terribly useful for repurposing text.
>

Quark (and I believe InDesign) have a "Save As EPS..."
capability which works pretty well. I think EPS is
technically a proprietary file format, but it's pretty
well-understood, and free Postscript interpreters such
as GhostScript are available under the General Public
License (GPL). I've had less success in reading PDF
documents with non-Adobe software.

>Photos and layout and graphics and charts are
>important too. Actually, it's kind of fun to go back
>into the old document and see how hard it is to
import >and reformat in a new program. (Am I crazy or
what?)

Yes you're crazy ;-)
If you're going to stick with various proprietary file
formats such as Quark XPress, sooner or later you're
going to be faced with the need to archive the
application itself, the old operating system, and the
hardware it runs on. This can be surprisingly tricky
to do (and I'm speaking as someone who restores old
hardware)

I'm facing a minor proprietary file-format woe right
now with my Kodak DCS200 DSLR: As far as I know, the
means to control the camera via it's SCSI connection,
and the workings of it's archive files have never been
made public, so the only means of access are via old
Photoshop Twain-aqquire modules which don't work with
newer versions of Photoshop. And so, I'm maintaining a
2nd hard drive in the computer with a Windows98
installation, and it's only purpose is to run a 16-bit
paint program that's compatible with said modules!
What a pain. The camera itself works as well as it
ever did

>Macs support standard CD formats. We don't need HFS+.
>I'm looking forward to Apple's future file system.
>They hired the guy who did the file system in BeOS,
>and that was some file system! Imagine your whole
file >system being true database! Now that could be
the >future of photo archiving!

I don't really understand the implications of such a
feature, but I do know thatI've actually had this
computer project nagging at me for some time now: I
want to put more of my photos online but hate
generating page after page of static HTML code which
is 95% identical, so have thought to use an Apache web
server, MySQL database and PHP (all free software, and
it runs on OS X too) to serve up pages dynamically.
And since no one's around to tell me that it might be
boatloads of work, I saw no reason why I couldn't
extend the idea to include more comprehensive photo
management capabilities, accessible anywhere, to
anyone with an internet connection and a web browser.
If I ever get off my butt and do something about it,
my software will also be free.

Jeff

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com
- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html