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Linda Harrison wonders: <<I am doing a bit of reading in the Adobe Acrobat
Help files, and they keep using the term "repurpose" as in "With Acrobat,
you can easily repurpose the contents of your documents using structured or
tagged Adobe PDF files." Can someone please tell me what they mean by
"repurpose"?>>
Break the word down into prefix and root and you'll see the meaning: "re" =
to do again, "purpose" = to give a purpose. So if you repurpose something,
you're giving it a new purpose--in the Acrobat case, changing something
originally destined for print to something ostensibly designed for online
use.
"Repurposed" is a bit of an awkward neologism, though it is well-formed (cf.
"repurify"). It's used often enough in the marketing community that I
consider it here to stay, and if you dislike the awkwardness, enjoy the
irony that the awkwardness is a very good metaphor indeed for dumping
printed documents online without considering the needs of the new medium and
the users of the online document.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a
personality, and an obnoxious one at that."--Kim Roper
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