This project, begun in FY81, involves collecting and encoding text on magnetic tape for typesetting by GPO. Eliminating rekeying by a typesetter, and thus the galley proof stage of production, has cut typesetting costs 80 percent. This year, we worked with an NIH consortium to investigate desk-top publishing methods for NIH; attending demonstrations of MBI, PC/RT, ITEK, and Xerox equipment, as well as the TYPE-X trade show. Medical Arts installed a typesetting system capable of working from floppy disks. Our test of a PC-created floppy failed on this system, which works well with all types of non-PC word processing diskettes. The only successfully input was achieved through an optical character recognition scan of hard copy. A generic coding scheme was announced this year by the National Information Standards Organization; with the help of GPO, our codes should one day be converted to these methods, to fit a more universal format.
