Friday, January 27, 2006

Paula Fredriksen PDFs

I've often praised the way that Paula Fredriksen has PDFs of lots of her key articles on her homepage and I sometimes set them as reading for my classes. I set one for my class later today "From Jesus to Christ: The Contribution of the Apostle Paul" but when I sat down to re-read it I was struck by how bad the quality of the scan was, at times almost unreadable. The same is true of several others on the page. It's a shame since it's a great contribution to on-line scholarship for those to be present; but people need to be able to read them if they are to take advantage of such a great contribution.
at

6 comments:

  1. Eric Rowe27 January 2006 at 10:42

    For what it's worth to any scholars who wish to make their articles available in this way, there are free programs that you can easily find via Google which allow you to create pdf files out of your original Word or Wordperfect files, assuming you still have these e-riginals.

    ReplyDelete
  2. J. B. Hood27 January 2006 at 11:01

    MG,
    I had a fair amount of success blowing these up. Takes longer to scroll, and it's still blurry, but it certainly is much more readable.
    J B Hood

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous27 January 2006 at 11:51

    I like the idea of doing this, but always wonder how publishers regard it. What is your experience of this, Mark?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous27 January 2006 at 12:38

    This 8 page PDF total 860 Kb. Why can the RBL publish a 13 page PDF [ 1319_4422.pdf ] at 280 Kb? Perhaps RBL could be contacted before anymore almost unreadable material is mounted?

    ReplyDelete
  5. crystal27 January 2006 at 15:29

    I hate pdf files and would rather have documents savable in other formats, maybe in part because I find them hard to see well ... why do people prefer to use pdf?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous11 July 2006 at 23:05

    PDFs do take getting used to, I agree, but those I have read, both online and downloaded, are fine. I find I need to adjust the magnification at times, and 66% works for me if I want most of the document on the screen.

    ReplyDelete