RE: Involving people without a computer

[Rich Puchalsky <rpuchalsky@att.net>]

Peter Schlesinger's amazing story of how his group learned file cabinets worth of material is all too common, unfortunately -- small groups of concerned people are often called upon to make these sacrifices.  

I'll comment on one technical issue: Peter Schlesinger wrote "Most of these are 3-4MB in size and don't download well on 28K modem access speeds" and later "luckily I had fast Internet access at work and could download those available as PDFs on to Zip disks."  Those files would not be 3-4 Mb in size if they weren't saved in the Adobe Acrobat PDF format.  I complained about EPA's use of this format at length in the prior discussion in this series on libraries.  PDF is bloated in size and makes text hard to copy and paste into other applications, and I suggested that ASCII be used whenever possible.

While I still think that EPA should stop using PDF in most cases, the prior discusson had some comments by an EPA employee who explained how PDF documents should be created in order to minimize their size.  If whoever was sending files to Peter Schlesinger would follow those instructions, the files would probably not be 3-4 Mb.