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On Wednesday 10 October 2007 09:46, James Fidell wrote: > Tom Potts wrote: > > I agree - for Paper Documents - its lousy on a screen*. > > 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. > > 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. 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). Almost invariably about presentation and not about useful content. All that glisters and that! > > 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. 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. > > That said, I don't think it's a valid criticism of PDF. On the other > hand, if people are using PDF where it's important that the content > should display on any device, I'd say they're probably using the wrong > format. I've had the misfortune to have to read 1000's of pdf's - not a single one needed to be PDF. Oh! Except (perhaps) the one that showed what PDF could do. PDF has its place - its just not as a communication medium on the internet. > I generally find a lot of people recognise the difference and > provide both PDF and HTML versions of documents to allow the reader to > use whichever is appropriate. There's possibly an argument that if a > document renders sensibly as HTML then there may be no need for a PDF > form, but actually sometimes I find PDF easier to read on-screen than > HTML. > > > And if you want me to read a paper formatted document send it to me in > > paper form. Why should I have to pay to kill a tree to read your > > document. You're not microsoft you know! > > * why should I buy a huge screen so I can make sense of your documents? > > Your not going to be able to read many PDF documents easily on the Eee > > but the same information in an HTML document will be legible to many. > > 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. The last thing I recall printing out (a couple of years > ago) was hundreds of pages of technical documentation for a VoIP->PSTN > interface where I wanted to compare pages side-by-side -- something I'd > not have been able to do on-screen no matter what the distribution > format. A lot of the technical documentation I read comes in PDF's and has to be printed to be read usefully. The contents/index links to page numbers - invariably out of step with the 'page' numbers. I'm just reading a 142 page document and its impossible to find any cross references on screen. As for comparing side by side - html will allow you to do that - unless of course you pointlessly force page widths on people in a way that modifying style sheets on the fly cant easily overcome. I cant understand why we insist on re-inventing the inefficiencies of the paper world in the so called computing era. Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html