June 16th, 1993

RTIFF is a utility which looks for TIFF files in the directory in which it
was run, organizes them into groups, and uses The Reading AdvantEdge to
recognize those groups. It will handle up to 2,000 TIFF files.

When you do batch scanning, the TIFF files created have a file name
composed of a "base name" and a sequence number. RTIFF assumes that base
name is alphabetic, so you should specify an alphabetic base name when
asked in the batch scanning menu. RTIFF will first sort the TIFF files
it finds based on the base names. It can handle multiple base names in
a single invocation, so you can have a directory containing TIFF files
from any number of batch scanning sessions. Secondly, RTIFF will divide
each list of files with the same base name into groups. By default, it
will do so in groups of 30, though you can change that. To use
a different group size, specify the size after a dash on the command line.
RTIFF -10 will recognize files in groups of 10, while RTIFF by itself
will recognize them in groups of 30. Each group of TIFF files is then
renamed, and passed to The Reading AdvantEdge. The current DEFAULT settings
will be used for recognition. The output file name will consist of the
original base name, followed by a two digit job sequence number. After a
group is recognized, the TIFF files revert to their original name.

So, if you have 117 TIFF files with a base name of INFOC, and another
72 TIFF files with a base name of ADVEN, you will end up with seven
output files, named INFOC01.TXT, INFOC02.TXT, INFOC03.TXT, INFOC04.TXT,
ADVEN01.TXT, ADVEN02.TXT, and ADVEN03.TXT.

If your default format is ASCII, you can use the DOS COPY command to
concatenate various output files together into one file. For other formats,
you should use the appropriate word processor to do the concatenation. To
follow from the previous example, you could do the following:

COPY /B INFOC01.TXT + INFOC02.TXT + INFOC03.TXT + INFOC04.TXT INFOCOM.TXT
COPY /B ADVEN01.TXT + ADVEN02.TXT + ADVEN03.TXT ADVENTUR.TXT

At least on my PC (I'm using DOS 6) you can shorten the above commands
as follows:

COPY /B INFOC*.TXT INFOCOM.TXT
COPY /B ADVEN*.TXT ADVENTUR.TXT

If you interrupt RTIFF, you will want to know about two batch files that
it creates. The first, RENTIFF.BAT, will rename any TIFF files whose names
have been temporarily altered back to their original names. You would
definitely want to use RENTIFF if RTIFF did not succeed. The second,
DELTIFF.BAT, contains delete commands for every TIFF file which was in
a group that was successfully recognized. If you type DELTIFF after doing
RTIFF, all successfully recognized TIFF files in the current directory will
be deleted.

To install RTIFF, simply copy it from this disk into a directory which is
on your path. The file name is RTIFF.EXE.

One note about default settings in The Reading AdvantEdge. You can create
named setting files whenever you wish, and you can load those setting files
in AdvantEdge. When The Reading AdvantEdge is invoked, it will check in the
current directory for a settings file named DEFAULT. If one exists, it will
be loaded. If it does not exist, a settings file will be loaded from
the main edge directory (typically \EDGE\ENGLISH) called DEFAULT. You may
create a DEFAULT settings file for any directory, causing different defaults
to be used depending upon which directory you are in, and you may change
the main edge default settings file whenever you choose.

I hope you find these helpful. Leave me a note if you have any problems
or comments.

Stephen Baum

