[Coco] RE: Rainbow on Disc

[Andrew]

First off, I want to say BRAVO! This is great news!

If all the logistics can be handled on this, success will be had.

As I noted in an earlier email, I can't really bear to destroy my 
magazines - but I am willing to help fund this thing a little bit, once 
things get rolling - maybe we could set up a "donation" paypal thing or 
something for the effort? Then convert it later for paying for the CDs/DVDs?

I think the effort should make as high quality scans as possible and 
reasonable to get as many pages/years as possible on a DVD. We will only 
get to do this once. I further think that they should be done in color 
in full, to respect the original layout and coloring decisions. Plus, 
this is a historical archive, so it behooves us to make it as accurate 
as possible, for future generations.

Also, should we make the "Book of Adventures" series a part of this? 
Some of these were more like magazines than books, and they do represent 
an important part of the Rainbow. But this wasn't mentioned in Lonnie's 
reply or anything, so where does this stand?

The CD/DVDs should be mastered in as portable a filesystem format as 
possible - something standard, like ISO9660 with full filenames, and 
joliet extensions (or whatever the standard is for data DVDs). The 
images should be in open formats, such as TIFF, PNG or JPEG (with the 
compression ratio small to keep quality high). I would choose PNG, but 
TIFF might be the better choice. I would say use PDF, as it is 
reasonably open for use - but raw images are better for OCR work, 
perhaps couple the images with a frame-by-frame formatted HTML pageset 
to load and browse the images? Hmm - with Javascript/CSS goodness to 
allow gallery and image sizing/zooming, etc...

Let's keep this ball rolling!

Andrew Ayers
Glendale (Phoenix), Arizona