Insomnia. How tiresome. But productive too.
I wandered into my front room where a pile of books, mostly Tertullian-related, sits on the side gathering dust. I intend to donate most of them to a scholar I know who has only limited access to such texts. I sort out a handful which I am pretty sure I have in PDF form.
This leads me to wonder where I might find the image files of books that I scanned long ago. These could be turned into PDF’s, after all.
And so to my cupboard, where piles of backup CDR’s stand. Some are labelled in a truly meaningful way, “only copy of roger_scan 1/4/2” and such like.
Out comes the external hard disk, and I begin the process of copying these disks onto it. I have two such hard disks, mirrors of each other, one of which lives in my house and the other in my car. The second CDR, and one directory is unreadable. Fortunately the rest of the disk is fine. But it’s a warning that CDR is not a permanent medium.
I find a book I remember copying. In the directory are … three .opd files. What on earth are those, I wonder? Memory suggests they must be Omnipage. I hope I have the software for that somewhere!
UPDATE: 00:50 hrs, and I have come across quite a few .opd files. It seems I switched to Finereader some time in 2001. But I still have Omnipage 9 and 10. I install Omnipage 10 on Win7 without problems, and it asks me to do an online registration. The screen that appears carefully explains what “HTTP” is, and offers other options including dial-in. I wonder uneasily whether the server will still be there — Caere, the manufacturer, is long gone. But it does. And it opens the .opd files too.
I know better than to accept the default tif compressed format for the export of the image files — TIF files could be quite chancy in those days, and no two applications could read each other’s compressed formats. But uncompressed tif processes fine on Win7. I soon have Gerlo’s 1940 edition of Tertullian’s De Pallio (in 2 long volumes) in PDF form.
Nothing electronic is permanent. Thank heavens I chose to look into this tonight. Another version of windows, a chance decision to clear out unused software, and that data would be gone for good.