Ten Years IAGSDC Digital Edition
10 Years IAGSDC Digital Edition is an electronic book ("e-book"), distributed as a PDF file.
The Digital Edition is a replica of the printed book, 10 Years IAGSDC: A Collection of Pages From Our Memory Book.
The Digital Edition was originally available for download] from the IAGSDC website, but the link and file were not carried over during the site's reworking circa 2014-2017.
The digital book is available for download here: Ten Years IAGSDC Digital Edition 1a.
Background
Allan Hurst borrowed a copy of the printed book from Andy Shore in the late '90s, and was fascinated by the contents, and disappointed that the book was out of print.
In 2006, Allan became editor of The Call Sheet, which was the newsletter for the Gay Callers Association. At that time, he changed the Call Sheet from a traditional newsletter format printed on paper to a professional journal format distributed electronically, as a PDF file. This inspired Allan to recreate 10 Years... in digital format.
At that time, Allan asked the IAGSDC board for permission to start such a project. Since the book was not an official publication of the IAGSDC, the board determined that no official permission was needed, and that the electronic book was not an official project. (Subsequently, in July of 2008, the electronic book became an official project of the IAGSDC.)
Allan located Luis Torres, the book's editor and copyright owner, and asked permission to recreate the book electronically, to ensure that it would never be lost. Although Luis didn't dance any more, he was pleased with the idea, and gave permission, subject to a few conditions:
- 1.The book must be reproduced exactly as published.
- 2.Typos in the book must not be corrected.
- 3.No text may be added, deleted, or otherwise changed, including factual information.
- 4.The resulting e-book must be distributed without charge.
- 5.While it was allowable to add an introduction and a colophon and/or any other supplementary material, none of it could be placed between the front and back covers of the book.
Although the e-book contains minor “white space” and line spacing variations, all text, graphics, and line-by-line formatting are reproduced faithfully, including typos.
The e-book is formatted such that the original book can be reproduced on duplex-capable printer.
Production Method
The entire book was scanned into a computer twice, using a Microtek ScanMaker i800. (Note: As of January 5, 2009, Microtek pulled out of the consumer electronics market, and now provides OEM technology to other manufacturers.)
The first pass through the scanner captured all of the pages with typed material, which was run through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program (ABBYY FineReader 5.0), and saved as RTF (“rich text format”) files.
The second pass through the scanner captured the pages with graphic material at a higher resolution than the text. The resulting graphic files were passed to Paul Asente for digital clean up and/or restoration. Microtek ScanWizard 5 was used for scanning graphic material.
Paul used Adobe Illustrator with some Adobe Photoshop, both version CS4, for the digital restoration and recreation of all of the graphic elements, including the front and back covers.
Allan recreated the page number graphics using a combination of Microsoft Windows Paint and SnagIt 9 Editor.
A team of volunteers, each armed with their own copy of the original (printed) book, manually proofed the RTF files, ensuring that the text was an exact match to the book.
The proofed RTF files were imported into an OpenOffice 3.0 Writer document template, and reformatted extensively to match the printed book.
The e-book's formatting is not exact in terms of paragraph and line spacing. The original book was pasted up by hand, not computer. The book was printed in a nonstandard large format. The e-book has been reformatted to fit onto an 8½” by 11” page. The reformatting only involved reducing the "white space" margins.
The reproduction was created using standard Microsoft Times New Roman and Arial, enlarged to 102% of normal size in an effort to match the original book's enlarged-by-photostat format.
The proofed pages were reassembled into OpenOffice documents organized by chapters. The exact pagination, layout, and line breaks of the original book were recreated manually. Each chapter was exported as a PDF file using OpenOffice.
The completed PDF files were assembled using Acro Software's CutePDF Professional 3.6.
While it would have been easier to scan the book into graphic pages, Allan wanted the book to be searchable.
Errata
Note these were not corrected in the digital edition - see Background above.
- digital pages (numbered pages) - 114 (94), 143 (123), 230 (210)
- "Ken Pollock" should be "Ken Pollack"
- --Freeman Stamper in an email to Andy Shore
- numerous references in section 12 "Stephanie Speaks"
- "Stephanie" should be "Steffany"
- --Freeman Stamper in an email to Andy Shore
