Subject:
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Re: PDF (was Re: legOS docs - what do people want?)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos
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Date:
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Sat, 20 Feb 1999 17:52:42 GMT
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Viewed:
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1352 times
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Mark Tarrabain wrote:
> More than a few people have emailed me already telling me that PDF is not the way to go
> because it will limit who can contribute to it (thank you to those people, by the way,
> for keeping such comments to email rather than cluttering the newsgroup with it).
> Since Acrobat Distiller is not a free piece of software, and isn't even actually
> available for some platforms, I can see their point.
>
> However, I still do believe that PDF is the best choice for distribution.
I _can_ read PDF files, but I would discourage making it the form that docs are released
in. I find reading PDFs to be a painful experience. My display is only 1024x768, and at
that resolution, reading the output of any page description language is difficult as the
type is terribly small, and the only alternative is panning around a page to see all of
the text. Most semiconductor manufacturers seem to be releasing their data sheets in PDF,
which, while admirable from the standpoint of portability, is really difficult to read.
It is great for printing, but online reading is torture.
This is true on both Linux and Winders, though it would be mitigated a little if the
Winders box had a decent video card and could, therefore, display antialiased fonts.
Since the Winders box belongs to my employer (I wouldn't be running it voluntarily), I
can't exactly just buy a decent video card for it.
I much prefer HTML (which is a markup language, not a page description language) as the
content is displayed in a manner which accomodates the user's environment, instead of
trying to display an entire letter or A4 sized page as a unit.
I agree with what another poster said about PDFs not necessarily being a problem if they
are generated from something else which can provide other, more user-friendly output.
This might be an excuse for me to finally learn to use TeX.
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