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Re: [LUG] yet another reason to avoid pointless pdfs

 

On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 09:12:24AM +0000, Tom Potts wrote:
> On Friday 05 January 2007 16:18, Benjamin A'Lee wrote:
> I agree - but I've yet to see documentation that cant be done just as well in 
> HTML - in fact frequently better because things like bookmarks can be made to 
> work more easily, free flowing the parts of a document that are suitable 
> means you can view multiple documents on screen simultaneously - something 
> that cant be done easily with 'page formatted' documents -  try putting two 
> pdf or word documents side by side on screen for comparison and then try the 
> same with two free flowing HTML documents. PDF is a tree killer!
> As for content re-use - and to some extent isn't that what FLOSS is about? 
> PDFs make that difficult. If you want to modify a PDF ore extract some image 
> from it then you need an editor - which is either cash or disk expensive or 
> both. But the data is not secure in it - if you can read it you can read 
> it..PDFs wont provide security just inconvenience.
> While there may be some real use for PDF's (other than force of habit) IMHO 
> they should never be used for simple communication. We may have cheap 
> terrabyte disk arrays and some of us have fast ADSL but downloading a 500k 
> pdf document on a phone modem to discover its just a couple of A4 pages and a 
> few dozen subtly different fonts that would have fitted in 10k of HTML and 
> been just as readable......and at least with HTML you could have used CSS and 
> changed the appearance of the document at the drop of a style sheet. And as 
> for changing the phone number of head office and finding you've 10billion 
> word and pdf documents spread over  10 thousand pcs's to update........
> 
Yes

Going on with the earlier discussion, this is what I like about
GNU/Linux and what I like about this UserGroup: there are always other
ways of doing things. Some may be a lot better

I HATE receiving pdf files when a simple text email would do

and I HATE proprietory file formats


--
Henry
Sat Jan  6 12:43:30 GMT 2007

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