[Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Timothe Litt]

Some of the PDFs on bitsavers are searchable.  It would be a good
project to OCR the rest into searchable pdfs - as that also means that
the text can be extracted.   OCR is getting good enough (finally) that
it's feasible.  I'm sure that they'd be accepted back into bitsavers  -
searchable is good for everyone.

For the Bookreader stuff - I wrote code to navigate it with my Braille
workstations, but it won't  work on other hardware.
Much of the later releases of VMS also shipped a PC format CD that can
be read with a screen reader.  In the next few months, I'll be
contributing a large collection of those to CHM.

Before I wrote that, I was able to get some of the docs in text format
from the tech writers; sadly that option no longer exists.

Most of the TOPS documentation was originally done in Runoff, later DEC
Standard Runoff.  Sources are, I think, on the later tapes.  That's 
easy to turn into readable text files.  Unfortunately, by the end I
think they were converted to VAX Document & shipped as postscript. 
There's always ps2text, but the quality is variable to bad.

On 05-Feb-16 17:50, Zachary Kline wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> So the recent RSTS/E discussion has got me wondering what OS’s I might be able to run under SIMH with readable documentation. As a totally blind enthusiast I can’t really use the Bitsavers collection without manually running OCR on the PDFs, a tedious and error-prone process.
> I’m aware VMS is recent enough to have a lot of its documentation available in an electronic format, but I’m curious if there’s anything else out there.
> I’ve recently downloaded several .tap files for RSTS and Tops-20, for instance, but have been running into trouble when booting them. 
> I guess I’m just curious how a lot of these systems were installed.
>
> Has any work been done on retyping some of the documentation?
> Thanks much,
> Zack.
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