(re: Interaction Magazine Poll) Hi Brandon! Glad to see you are still working on this. 🙂 It means a lot to those of us who don’t have the pleasure of owning copies of the original magazine!
In answer to your questions, I too have to emphasize that these scans should represent the magazines as-is, i.e. with EVERYTHING in there. Please do not skip pages with little or no Sierra-related material on them! It is still relevant to scan these pages to represent how the magazines looked.
As for the file sizes, unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any good DjVu encoders available for free, at least for Windows. If you’re using Linux you might want to check out the djvulibre, which features an encoder that allows for mask images to be used, i.e. a manually drawn black-and-white image of the same size as the image you’re encoding to specify what should be background and what should be foreground. This would eliminate the problems of the crappy foreground/background detection problem we’ve discussed before and thereby allowing great quality pics with much smaller file sizes than PDF. Encoding the scans as photos would still make the file size/quality ratio better than PDF, but since this is a poor utilization of the DjVu format it would probably be just as well to go with PDF as you seem to have decided to do.
And I can’t stress enough that you should make the scans high-quality from the beginning and archive them for later. I’d definately be prepared to buy them on CD, and in any case there might be chances to upload those somewhere later anyway. You shouldn’t spend so much time on perfecting the quality though. Just take care to scan the pages in their entirety and with correct alignment. If there are stains, folds etc. on the pages, they can always be touched up digitally later, and the important thing is to get the pages scanned correctly in the first place.
