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On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 08:55:01AM +0000, Tom Potts wrote:
> On Thursday 04 January 2007 19:46, John Palmer wrote:
> > On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, Paul Sutton wrote:
> > > Isn't part the reason things are in pdf, (esp science documents) is that
> > > they are writtne using latex, which seems to be a standard, then
> > > converted to pdf from there.
> >
> > There is also pdflatex, which writes pdf directly.
> >
> Why PDF? It offers absolutely nothing to the world. Its just another useless
> proprietary format. There were one or two things that required to be printed
> exactly to scale - but since you can now print to fill the paper size then
> that potential usefulness has gone and its just another way of cluttering up
> your computer.
Why not? It's better than a word document, as others have mentioned. It
has free (or at least gratis) readers on Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux and
Unix. Admittedly, the Adobe reader is crap.
Until ODF becomes more widely used (assuming MS OpenXML doesn't
sidetrack it) PDF is probably the best format for a lot of things (any
that plaintext or HTML aren't good enough for).
> Reading a PDF document in a browser has always been a bit of a nightmare and
> gobbles up CPU and disk space. Why on earth does the browser plugin waste
> space with a search the web option????
Then don't read it in a browser? Though I've never had any problems with
XPDF embedded into Firefox (install mozplugger on Debian, it all happens
automagically).
> So you don't actually gain anything through using it but make life difficult
> for others.
If I wanted to make life difficult for them, I'd send them a Word
document, or the LaTeX source of the PDF.
bma
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