>>I have to confess that I am not a particular fan of .pdf or of any
"proprietary" storage format.<<

I agree with Doug but would go one step further.  I would include .tif
as a proprietary format.  Both .pdf and .tif are owned by Adobe.  The
.pdf is a more acceptable format because of the early Adobe strategy to
give away the free Reader.  No other viewer has come forward that has a
widespread distribution.  

I also have heartburn with the file sizes generated by both .tif and
.pdf documents.  They can be extremely large, especially when scanning
in color.  As mentioned earlier, multiformat .tifs are an issue to OCR.
I have had good luck with Adobe Capture but the file sizes are hard to
swallow.  

I am a strong supporter of the .djvu format.  A true open source format,
file sizes are very small when compared to .tif or .pdf.  Like .pdf, the
viewer is freely available.  In addition, serving up documents is very
fast, OCR is outstanding, including multiple language support, and
navigating a large document is lightning fast when compared to either
.tif or .pdf.

Bill R

Bill Roach, CRM
Enterprise EDMS Coordinator
State of North Dakota
ITD/Records Management
701-328-3589
 

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