Well, then, if Israeli's so smart, why isn't he rich? Why doesn't every newspaper have six of these?

Here's part of the reason: Iota's technology was encased in a marketing agreement with Hyphen Inc., and was given a Stealth introduction at NEXPO '94 in Las Vegas. Only a few people saw it before Israeli and cohorts hopped a plane out of the country.

This low-key coming-out party now seems oddly prophetic, since Hyphen itself has since faded from the newspaper supplier scene, leaving Israeli without a marketing organization just when he was turning a demo into a product.

Penalized half the distance to the goal, Israeli has had to develop smaller marketing channels, mostly in Europe, where his product's ability to run under all European languages (including Hebrew, of course) at least gets the salesman's foot in the door.

Another part of the reason: Granted, it's a great idea, but how well does Newsware work? Nobody knows for sure, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

Israeli points to the Palestine Post, which has scanned in 10 years of legacy documents, with the intention of going back 40 years (everything from the '70s onward is electronic).

He also points to TV Guide of Radnor, Pa., which he claimed had been using Newsware for two months. A call to the magazine revealed that yes, the Newsware system has been in place for a couple of months, but for evaluation only. TV Guide has made no move to buy.

And, Israeli says, he's been talking with that ubiquitous purveyor of microfilm, microfiche and CD-ROM, University Microfilms Inc. (EMI), about an agreement under which Iota's software would be teamed with hardware from a microfilm scanner manufacturer whose name he would not reveal.

So, in effect, we're back to 1994, when we said Iota Industries was worth watching. Now it's even more inviting because as Israeli said, "That was mostly an idea. Now we have a product."

If he can sell it to a newspaper and it works as advertised, he'll likely have a profitable company as well.

Adobe Acrobat
By now the whole world knows of the mysteries of the PDF (Portable Document File) format of Adobe Acrobat; it's become its own standard because Adobe had the smarts to develop it for every computer platform known to humankind.

Moreover, when the engineers were done programming, it didn't hurt to have Adobe's marketing clout behind it.

The result is that if your application can output in PostScript, Acrobat can make a PDF file of it.

Times Mirror's Newsday of Melville, N.Y., is starting PDF archiving of current issues, and even Boss Cole has cranked up the Acrobat distiller and produced PDFs of back issues of this very newsletter for distribution on the World-Wide Web.

Acrobat has developed into something of a graphical Swiss Army pocket knife. It can be turned into TIF or object-oriented files, put on CD-ROM products, shipped through the ether on e-mail. Netscape is integrating it into the next version of its World-Wide Web browser.

And every PDF file's text elements can be full-text searched. Which brings us to Acrobat and legacy material.

The indexing of every text word in a PDF file takes place during the distillation process, meaning that you have to start with a PostScript file. That's fine for today's stuff, but for legacy work, you need a scanner to produce a file that can be distilled.

This is where Catalog and Capture, Adobe "helper" applications, come in. Capture scans the page and turns it into a PDF file, while Catalog indexes every letter it reads in the PDF file.

"You can use the same archive and search techniques to go retrospectively, as well as forward," said Gary Cosimini, Adobe's business development manager for publishing, who adds that ending up with the industry-standard PDF format is a "huge benefit."

On the down side, Capture runs more as an adjunct to Acrobat, and it doesn't seem to have many of the industrial-strength advantages -- for example, color recognition -- Iota cites for its Newsware system. There are improvements planned for Capture, such as OLE (object linking and embedding) and plug-in support, Cosimini said, but it's hardly Adobe's crown jewel.

Nonetheless, newspapers are gearing up to try it out. Emerge, a consulting outfit and service bureau in Madison, Wis., is working with textbook publishers and Madison's morning daily, the Wisconsin State Journal, to see how feasible legacy archiving can be.

Andrew Young, president, and Kurt Foss, director of Internet and Acrobat training, have enough experience with the process to be realistic about it.

"The hurdles are set fairly high at this time," said Foss. "There's no such thing as completely accurate OCR recognition. It's getting a lot easier, but it does require human intervention."

For example, text stored on microfilm often has to be restored to 100 percent to be scanned fairly accurately.

"The quality of the image makes a big difference -- at 100 percent and 400 dpi, it's pretty accurate," said Young. "By the time you get to the third or fourth generation of microfilm, it may not be too pretty."

Again, time -- and experimentation -- will tell.

"We think it offers a solution," Foss said. "Now we need to talk to librarians to really find out."

-- John Bryan

Adobe Systems Inc.,
(415) 961-4400;
Emerge Inc.,
(608) 829-3454;
Iota Industries Ltd.,
(011) {972} 3-562 1363.

Also see Real-world legacy issues

From THE COLE PAPERS, November 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.