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On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 02:36:34PM +0100, Tom Potts wrote:
> Office Software - and PDF's - are a new form of one way encryption for your
> data.
Why do you say this like it's the fault of the PDF format? That's
exactly what it was designed for - unambiguous, device-independent,
display-independent representation of a file in exactly the way it will
be printed or as close as possible. You're not supposed to be able to
change them once they've been created - you change the source file and
create a new version (using PDFTeX, Docbook, whatever).
It's not the fault of the format that PDF files are used unnecessarily,
when another format would perhaps be more appropriate (HTML is probably
the most useful format for electronic documents, again created from TeX
or Docbook source). PDF is designed for fixed layouts that appear the
same no matter how big your screen is, and usually those layouts are
based around A4/Letter paper sizes, otherwise the document wouldn't be
printable; allowing the layouts to be resized/reshaped would mean you
can't guarantee that the document will look the same on all
screens/printers.
For on-screen documentation, where paper-shaped layouts are irrelevant,
other formats should be used (HTML?), created from the same source as
the PDF. If they're not, that's the fault of the document creator, not
the format.
Ben
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