uploading text and pics

There a couple of ways to do this...

Your scanning software is saving the file in a format open office can't recognize - which is probably a good thing as the doc file created would be huge because of the open office overhead on top of the scanfile size. Posting a scanned file is probably the last thing you want to do.

The most straightforward way to do this is to scan the pages and save each page as a jpeg (.jpg/.jpe) picture file. You can then ftp the jpg's up to the web server and either provide a link to each page or create an html page that contains the jpg's. File size will still be large - probably to large for dial-up users.

Some scanning software can read the text (OCR) and produce separate files - text and pictures that you can use to recreate the magazine article in html. Be sure to save the pictures as jpg's. The text will require substantial editing as OCR is an imperfect technology.

If you have the article saved as a .doc file, get yourself a pdf maker - typically they act as a "printer" but save the file to a .pdf instead of printing it out. PDF is a universally accepted format. Adobe makes the Acrobat pdf reader and gives it out for free. They make an Acrobat pdf writer too but it's on the expensive side. You can get other pdf write software for about $30 US. You'll find you use it a lot more than you thought.

The best way to publish as html is to copy the text you already have for the article using clipboard, past it into an html document, and then re-apply any formatting. Then insert your original pictures where appropriate for the best quality. Scan just the pictures from the magazine if you must, but quality will be lower.

My wife publishes a lot of articles. When we put them on the web, we put 3 formats out there. - .doc, .pdf, and .html The .html is always created from scratch (cut and paste text, insert pictures) to keep the file sizes down. If I could only have one format for putting published material on the web, it would be PDF.


Edited by dpyers - 26 December 2005 at 1:33pm