D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

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

 

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.
The only other vaguely useful option was to make it uneditable - ie less 
usable by the recipient but there are many ways of extracting the text from a 
document - pdf2txt OCR etc. 
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????
So you don't actually gain anything through using it but make life difficult 
for others.
Oh Happy New Year.
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