Hi folks,

THis year I got the fun of being field day chairman for our club.  aT
one time one could get the rules for the event in ascii.  Not anymore.
Arrl insists on using that damned acrobat non-reader.

Accessibility!  What accessibility?  A friend of mine tried some of
the pdf to txt sources on the net, no joy, so he tried his
accessibility plug-in for the stupid software.  NO joy either.  I'm
about ready to raise several different colors of hades with arrl hq
on this issue.

NO folks, I'm not going to print out a doccument just to feed it to
ocr which I don't have running at the moment then throw away what was
a perfectly good tree, then print it out again in braille once I've
edited out the errors made by the ocr software.

My hatred for these folks is beginning to know no bounds.  I'm going
to first see why it is the league can't use ascii for such things,
smaller file sizes are definitely an advantage, but first I wanted to
see if anybody on this list had any luck getting usable text from the
damned pdf file which is this year's fd rules first.

my real gripe is that just a few short years ago such things could be
downloaded from the league in ascii.  wHy all the change for the sake
of cute?  iF they'd at least create those files using text instead of
an image then the accessibility features would work according to a
friend of mine who will actually fight this gui junk, but I don't
know.  I put in my share of time, actually more than many as part of
the field organization and appreciate the break on the membership fee
since I get QST in another format, but such things as contest rules
etc. should be machine readable imnsho.
73 de nf5b



Richard Webb

Electric Spider Productions
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

--- Benjamin Franklin, NOvember 1755 from the
Historical review of Pennsylvania