May I suggest another candidate for this project. The Player Piano
Group Bulletin (UK) is available, and doesn't need translation either!

 [ Just provide a glossary of British-isms!  ;)   -- Robbie

I've been editing this about 6 years now, and have slowly increased the
percentage of electronic input.  The bulletin which went out last week
was a first, being totally electronically typeset (using WordPerfect, a
cheap PC and the scanner at work).  Photographs were scanned in as
bitmaps and diagrams were scanned as black & white line drawings, all
cleaned up as needed via a photo-paint package.

The whole 48 pages (A5 size, 8 by 5 1/2 inches) came to about 4 Mb.
Is it just me, or are others still impressed by the extraordinary
technology that allows all this!

We are on bulletin 146, so you could get all the bulletins to date on
a single 650 Mb CD-ROM.  The next issue would then be in 2039!  Can
you wait for it?

Pretty well all submissions these days are on disk, by email, or typed.
The latter get scanned and OCR'd to get them into text form.  The
software is pretty good for laser-printed or neatly-typed stuff, but
needs help for dot-matrix or faxed originals where letters such as 'n'
come out as 'ri' (a real proof that computers are extremely stupid!).

Word-processor spell checkers don't seem to recognise scanner-type
errors yet, so they all have to be corrected by hand.  Sometimes
running originals through a photocopier set to dark bulks the letters
up and gives more accurate results.  The time taken with a bad original
can be prodigious, and a decent typist would win quite easily.  Good
originals and a hopper-feed scanner give results impressively fast.

The end result of all this is that the latest PPG bulletin could be put
directly onto a CD-ROM with only the effort to convert formats.  A
hypertext index could be produced automatically (?) to speed up access.

I think that a graphic-only scanned image on CD-ROM would be next to
useless, as you wouldn't be able to do anything with the text such as
auto-translation or hypertext.  If going to all the effort such a
project would require, it should be done to maximise the use of the
end product.

Julian Dyer