I just spent the last nine years of my life working in the Printing
Technologies group at Adobe Systems in San Jose. Yes, creating a PDF from
printed materials requires scanning at a fairly high resolution, and further
processing if optical character recognition is performed so the resulting
file can be searched for text. The resulting PDF is internally composed of
large bitmap graphic files and associated text files if OCR is performed,
and for something like a service manual with schematics, can weigh in pretty
large. For scanning and creating a PDF in this manner, the ideal tools are
some expensive scanning equipment, a number of (sometimes expensive)
software applications, and a decent computer.
These days printed service manuals are all created in some type of computer
word processor, or page-layout and design application, and it is VASTLY
simpler to generate a PDF file from the software that created the manual in
the first place. Ideally the final layout of text and graphics is performed
in something like Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress or Adobe FrameMaker, and
generating a PDF is pretty much as easy as sending the file to print. The
tools required are a decent computer and some software. Adobe Acrobat is
the best choice, but a Macintosh can generate simple PDF files without
Acrobat, and there are some other third-party applications that also
generate PDFs of varying quality. In PDF files generated this way, graphics
are usually vector drawings, and text is not data-dense, so the resulting
PDF files are typically very compact and fully searchable.
Of course, none of this software existed when these manuals were created
(Adobe Systems went public in 1986), so the manuals never existed in a
format that the manufacturer could easily create a PDF from, and so we are
left with scanning as our only option.
I created the PDF for the EX-8000 User Guide that is posted to the Yahoo
Group, as well as the downloads section of my website:
http://www.dw8000.com
by Xeroxing the manual, then running the stack of xeroxed pages through a
sheet-fed scanner driven by a computer running Adobe's Acrobat Capture
product, which rapidly scans pages about as fast as they can be fed through
the sheetfed scanner, and digitizes them on-the-fly while performing OCR.
The resulting file is text-searchable, but the graphics are heavily
compressed using LZW compression. This isn't lossy compression like JPG,
but you can see large blocks of solid chunks on the cover, for example, as
the software carved up the large areas of solid black on the front cover.
That process required a decent computer, a fairly expensive scanner, and
some fairly expensive software. But I had access to it, so I did it!
Sincerely,
Mark Barnes
Russell Rose wrote:
> No pdf's but am willing to share whateve r pages you require in
> xeroxed form. Can mail. Sorry no pdf
> I wish I could explain to you and a 100,000 other people that a pdf
> of a service manual is much much harder
> thing to create than one might think, unless I am deluded, which is
> entirely possible. It appears that I would need a scanner
> that is capable of handling pages that are 11X17 inches and Adobe
> software to create the document which not only is not free
> but also is too much money for my pocket. Otherwise I hand it over to
> a pro, who also charges bucks. Meanwhile
> if you have away aROUND THIS, please share it with me as I have been
> after this problem for years, No foolin,
> Sincerely, Russ
> On Dec 19, 2006, at 4:04 AM, gupidziadek wrote:
>
>> Hello, although I'am really in need of having Service Manual for
>> DW8000 I do not ask for it, since it seems like noone here claims to
>> own it or would like to share it. Instead, does anyone have test data
>> for adjustment procedure in syx or have the description of all the
>> parameters for test patches to setup manualy (I think there should be
>> a procedure for that in the service manual just as it is for Poly800)?
>> And since I am in a hurry I would prefer pdf.
>> Many thanks