Monday, May 4, 2009

litsupport summary for the week ending on 05/03/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.


Q. What are the possible approaches to "I want to redact now" need, and can one redact native documents?
A. The editors understand that the topic may be broader than what is addressed in this week's responses. Our goal is to accurately summarize the responses made without adding any material on our own. There are three approaches. We will use the term TIFF, but it applies equally to PDF.
  • TIFF everything up-front, keep it hidden in the database, and "turn it on" when you want to redact. It may be called "TIFF on demand," but in reality the TIFFs are there. The potential downsides are higher processing costs and larger database, which may slow down performance;
  • "Image on the fly" generates TIFF when needed, and one may have to wait while the document is generated, unless the vendor generates individual pages when viewed. Potential issues are documents that are hard to image, such as spreadsheets with pivot tables;
  • "Native redaction" are tools that overlay redactions over the native document, giving more flexibility and allowing to modify redactions. The potential problem to watch is that the coordinates of the redactions must be burned precisely into the image of the document on production.


Q. Should self-promotion with cartoons be allowed in the group, and can the cartoons be considered self-promotion?
A.


Pros: it is fun, and we need fun; we are all vendors here anyway, and litsupport staff too has to "sell" their services to their firms; we are all self-promoting, even a business card or a signature is self-promotion;
Cons: the rules of the group disallow direct promotion; the cartoons are too much pro-business; they are not directly related to the purpose of the group, there are also many buyers here.


This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

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