New subject: [Alug] Syleham Meeting

6 Sep 2001


      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)