Page:Exploring the Internet.djvu/39

 The useless batch was several hundred megabytes of AUTOCAD drawings, furnished by the draftsmen who did the CCITT illustrations. Diagrams for the Blue Book were done in AUTOCAD, then manually assembled into the output from the proprietary text formatting system. The draftsmen were very helpful and quickly said I could have any data I needed.

On my way out of meeting with the draftsmen, however, one of them starting asking some questions about scanners and babbling on about TIFF files. I was puzzled. Why should I care about scanners and TIFF files when I had the diagrams in the original formats?

Turned out that AUTOCAD was indeed used for the diagrams, with the exception of any text in the illustrations. The textless diagrams were sent over to the typing pool, where people typed on little pieces of paper ribbon and pasted the itsy-bitsy fragments onto the illustrations. Come publication time, the whole process would be repeated, substituting typeset ribbons for typed ribbons. A nice production technique, but the AUTOCAD files were useless.

The rationale for this bizarre document production technique was that each diagram needed text in each of the three official languages that the ITU published. While AUTOCAD (and typing) was still being used, the ITU was slowly moving over to another tool, MicroGrafix Designer. There, using the magical concept of layers, they were proudly doing "integrated text and graphics."

The second batch of DOS files looked more promising. Modern documents, such as the new X.800 recommendations, were being produced in Microsoft Word for Windows. My second batch of tapes had all the files that were available in the Word for Windows format, the new ITU publishing standard.

To do the conversion, I was quite lucky to be working with Sun Microsystems on a research grant. They had sent over two large servers for a research program I was participating in and graciously agreed to allow us to use one server to post standards on the network. Without their help, we wouldn't have had the resources to do anything.