(Jumping in at Bea's request...)

At MBSI's (and specifically, Frank Metzger's) request, I have been
looking into the feasibility of putting various mechanical music
publications, and more specifically the MBSI Journal, onto CD-ROM.
Our journals are full of pictures, not always the best quality, the
text contains words and names of a specialized nature, and often there
are pictures of text in script or old type faces.

The current state of technology, for publications that predate
computers, is to scan the pages with a high resolution scanner, and
then subject the scanned images to a text recognition process, followed
by a proofreading and correcting pass.  The result is a high quality
image, that can be printed with the fidelity of the original, and a
hidden text layer that can be searched, copied, etc.

Using Adobe's Acrobat (.pdf) format, and the Acrobat Capture tool for
the first pass on the text, produces documents similar to the article
on the MBSI web page (e.g. http://www.mbsi.org/publica.html ).  Color
pages can be done the same way.

The current cost to produce these files is on the order of $US 5. to
$US 10.  per page.  This will come down as the Capture technique gets
better, and less post-processing (proofreading) is required.  There are
companies that will do this on a service bureau basis.

Also, as many of you are aware, the capacity of CD-ROM is rapidly
increasing from 650 MB to 7GB and more, reducing the number of CDs
required to hold a library.  At the same time, one can now produce a
CD-ROM at home for about $US 3 per disk!  Bulk copying is even cheaper.

For future publications, we are moving towards all-electronic mastering
of the MBSI Journal, at least, and so hold out the possibility of going
directly from the master to a .pdf file, with no scanning required and
a guarantee of 100% accuracy on the text.  We're not there, yet, and it
is not a zero-cost proposal to require that ALL of the Journal (covers,
ads, articles, pictures) be in electronic form, and furthermore in
magazine- ready page format.

Having said that, it is inevitable that we will get there someday.
We are working towards that now, but publication and mailing of the
current paper Journals must always have priority over our experiments
with new technology.

Those of you producing journals (all of you, not just MBSI) should be
looking at using tools like Adobe PageMaker or Frame, or Quark Express,
to create publications that can be sent to a printer and can also be
converted directly to Acrobat (.pdf) format for electronic archiving.
We are very nearly there, in terms of technology.

Marc Kaufman