Greetings!
Those of you who were at the last Syleham meeting may recognise me, if I describe myself as 'Ancient John' (whose wife made the biscuits), for I am well past my sell-by date, possibly past my display-until date, but I hope not past my use-by one.
I do articles for a technical magazine. That magazine, like others, including Linux ones, uses Apple Macs for publishing. You could save the magazine's type setter from being murdered - and me from life imprisonment for that murder, if you can help me with (at Syleham) conversion of a postcript file to a pdf one. I had this demonstrated to me (but not on my Linux box), using the Linux command, ps2pdf, but I did not succeed in making it work when I got home.
I am fed up to the back teeth with having symbols, such as degree signs, proper dashes and greek letters which I have carefully put in, being stripped out and not replaced or not replaced properly.
My main reason for trying to use Linux is that I am working on communication for the deafblind. Many of the blind have not a hope of learning Braille. I understand that less than a quarter of the blind in the USA are literate in Braille. Computer technology that can work fast and efficiently is necessary for my project. If Linux is the operating system to go for, and I believe it is, I am hampered by a singular lack of expertise.
Apart from configuration of zip drive and card for two additional serial ports I am stumped by configuration of the SCSI card, and so the scanner. It looks as if no appropriate module is being loaded.
Scanning is an essential. The idea is for the deaf blind user to secure an opened book to the scanner. The scanner scans, feeds its output to the best OCR software to be had. The output from that is fed to a special shorthand system which I am developing. In turn, this is fed to a chord system reader. This latter (though not in its final form) is up and running, and I am learning to read on it. The time is rapidly approaching when I shall be really hampered by lack of a scanner that I can use.
My Linux box's RAM figure is 128. Processor speed 500. Linux kernel 2.0 Linux flavour SuSE 7.0 Hard disk 20G
I do hope there may be someone at Syleham who can come to my aid. I may bring the prototype chord reader as well as a couple of strange keyboards, if interest warrants.
Ancient John (Atkinson)