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On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:46:31 +0100 James Fidell <james@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Tom Potts wrote: > > > I agree - for Paper Documents - its lousy on a screen*. Depends how the PDF is created. It is certainly possible to create PDF files that are not based on paper sizes. Typically, I produce those from presentation-type software so there is a gap in the formatting tools, not the format. I'd like to be able to create screen-shape PDFs from DocBook but right now creating paper-shape PDFs from DocBook is hard enough when using the formatting tools rather than OOo. Probably the best viewer for DocBook is actually yelp. I need to find the XSL that they use at runtime so that I can create yelp HTML files that others can view outside yelp itself. > > However if, as someone else said, you want your paragraph in a certain font > > then you have to embed all the fonts in your document - that ends up with a > > severely bloated document. Or you could use LaTeX and get a severely bloated package installation but a smaller (less portable) file. ;-) > My recollection of a "seminar" I attended many many years ago, certainly > before most people had heard of PDF and probably before a lot of people > had heard of HTML, was that the entire point of PDF was that it should > render exactly the same way as the originator intended irrespective of > the medium. If memory serves, LaTeX predates PDF, HTML and RTF. > That's why it's necessary to embed fonts etc. It's as much > concerned with presentation as content (in fact, I think I'd probably > argue that it's *more* concerned with presentation than content). Indeed - with a predisposition for US-letter or A4. > A corollary of this is that there are a whole range of display devices > which are wholly unsuited to displaying PDF because they just don't > provide the necessary functionality. They would be fine if the PDF wasn't inherently paper sized. IMHO what PDF needs is a remapping from paper view to screen view but the problem with PDF is that despite the verbosity of the format, it doesn't include *enough* data to remap to a different size because it loses track of all the page numbers, internal links and document sections. > Some authors actually don't care > about that because it's more important to them that the document should > render exactly the way they require it to and their attitude is that if > you can't view it by some method that allows it to do so, tough. Sadly, most PDF authors *do not* require that the PDF renders exactly as they intended - they simply assume that PDF is what everyone wants because their only other option (as they see it) is a Word document. If MS actually retained a compatible Word format, most PDF documents on the WWW would actually be Word documents. > I think that may be a personal preference thing. I have a 1280x1024 > display, not large by any standards, and read a lot of PDF documentation > on-screen. I have to read quite a lot on a 1074x768 and the "split-screen" mentality drives me nuts. These are PDFs inherently designed to be viewed on the computer as e-learning support but because the originals also exist in paper form, the PDF is the A4 export of the original. I much prefer to read DocBook - especially if I can download the complete docbook and view it in yelp. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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