Producing PDFs (was Re: Scanned (PDF) original descriptions)

[Curtis Clark]

At 22:49 2002-05-14, Fabio Moretzsohn wrote:
>7) Now produce the PDF file using Adobe Acrobat macro from your word
>processor, or print the document to Acrobat, instead of a printer. I prefer
>the latter.

A PDF containing only the OCRed text of a protologue is potentially
harmful--it should also contain the original scan. Even a small, overlooked
mistake can change meaning, and if a web-based PDF is available, Murphy's
Law states that no one will look at the original again until it can cause
the most nomenclatural disruption.

For protologues in languages without good spell-checkers (such as Latin),
mistakes are even more likely. A reprint of the Latin protologue of the
California poppy stated that it had leathery testicles; I can only surmise
that a single-letter gender change obscured the fact that it was the
seed-coat that was leathery.

At 23:17 2002-05-14, Ron Gatrelle wrote:
>The main reason I always use embeded fonts is for the sake of symbols -
>male & female in particular.

Although I have produced a font that maps male and female to keyboard
letters, both symbols are in the Unicode standard, are accessible from
Unicode-aware programs such as Microsoft Word, and are present in a number
of common TrueType fonts (although most of them are extremely ugly). For
electronic data exchange, it is important to always use Unicode, or another
character encoding that is interconvertible with Unicode, so that future
investigators will not have to wonder what you meant.


--
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department             Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University      FAX: (909) 869-4078
Pomona CA 91768-4032  USA                  jcclark at csupomona.edu