The British Caving Association

All CREG journals from issue #26 to the present are in stock and available from CREG, apart from #28, which will be reprinted on demand. Please see http://bcra.org.uk/creg/jnl/ for lists of contents of each journal and see http://caves.org.uk/payments/creg/ for information on how to buy them.

Issues 1 to 25 are now available, in two volumes, from the online publisher Lulu, so you should order direct from them by going to my page at http://lulu.com/gardenshedpress/ We are not planning to stock issues 1-25 ourselves. Clearly, getting Lulu to handle the printing and shipping saves us a lot of time and effort.

I must thank Rob Gill for his painstaking work in scanning our paper masters of issues 1 to 25, and then re-scanning and re-processing them in order to meet the fairly strict file configuration settings of the online publisher. Whilst Rob was doing that I was trying to piece together our archived MSWord documents for the later journals and turn them into PDFs so we could get the out-of-stock issues re-printed digitally. This was not straightforward, because 15-year-old Word documents do not port correctly to modern machines. Subtle differences in fonts and units of measurement seem to be enough to throw the formatting completely out.

Eventually, we hope to put our back issues on the web as downloadable PDFs but, for now, they are only available on paper.

Something of interest I came across recently might be of interest here. There is a specific pdf standard for digital archiving called pdf/a. This format has a better chance than most of still being readable many years from now without those subtle changes creeping in. See http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/standards/pdfa/

David Cooke wrote:There is a specific pdf standard for digital archiving called pdf/a. This format has a better chance than most of still being readable many years from now

Thanks, Im sure that will be very helpful. The problem of archiving is one that BCRA Council has been discussing, but without a solution so far. Perhaps pdf/a might be the answer? One of the difficulties is that PDF documents are clearly not always "portable", although they are certainly more portable than some other formats. We have had a lot of problems with our editors creating PDFs which our printers could not correctly interpret, despite our using embedded fonts. Typically, the problem manifests itself as incorrect characters being printed, or line formatting getting corrupted. See http://www.british-caving.org.uk/phpBB3 ... f=29&t=342 The person who responded to that posting was extremely helpful and clearly knew absolutely everything there is to know about PDFs. I keep meaning to summarise his main finding from his detailed forensic analysis of our PDFs. I will do that one day. OTTOMH it was a problem with fonts (dont use Truetype) and PDF generation (use a "proper" package).

I doubt if pdf/a is "the answer" but it might well be part of the answer.

If pdf/a does what it says on the tin then it should go a long way to addressing those problems although clearly Adobe can't control external printer drivers etc. but at least you are starting from a solid base.