The whole idea of going to a PDF file is to take advantage of the additional
features that are available through Adobe Acrobat, namely:
- Improved illustrations
- Improved type-setting: stuff that comes out of TeX isn't the best quality
in my opinon. It isn't easy to read on-line. Maybe printed out it's OK,
but
I want an easy to read online, top quality, book.
- You get a lot of other additional, instructional features in Adobe Acrobat
you simply won't get by producing a PDF via sgml translators
(color illustrations, audio, video, hypertext within the document and
hypertext links to the Internet).
By producing a PDF by translating from sgml, you simply miss the whole point of
producing a PDF in the first place.
Since the Adobe Acrobat Reader is free, it won't cost the user anything to get
top-quality documentation.
Jeffrey Thompson
>
> To: Roger Williams <roger@coelacanth.com> cc: gpg-list <g10@net.lut.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: Manual Contact
> > I think that this is only true if you assume that PDF == Windows. If
> > you instead start with good Postscript code, you'll end up with a good
> > PDF. PDF's flate compression will normally result in PDFs that are
> > *smaller* than the text original.
> >
> > For example, we write our technical documents in LaTeX (with LyX), but
> > usually have to convert them to PDF for distribution to our customers.
> > A typical 100-page specification might be a 400K TeX file, which
> > results in a 550K PS file, which gets converted (by pstill or ps2pdf)
> > to a 155K PDF (compared to 95K for the gzipped TeX file).
> > I think that the ability to distribute files in multiple formats is a
> > *good* thing -- and smgltools is a good way to do this -- but don't
> > knock PDFs on the basis of size or the need for Windoze or Adobe
> > Distiller, as neither of these assumptions is accurate.
> I stand corrected. :) I think that if we can produce an sgml version and
> then a postscript version that we can then pop out a pdf version.
> Everyone is then happy.
> From,
> Matthew M. Copeland
features that are available through Adobe Acrobat, namely:
- Improved illustrations
- Improved type-setting: stuff that comes out of TeX isn't the best quality
in my opinon. It isn't easy to read on-line. Maybe printed out it's OK,
but
I want an easy to read online, top quality, book.
- You get a lot of other additional, instructional features in Adobe Acrobat
you simply won't get by producing a PDF via sgml translators
(color illustrations, audio, video, hypertext within the document and
hypertext links to the Internet).
By producing a PDF by translating from sgml, you simply miss the whole point of
producing a PDF in the first place.
Since the Adobe Acrobat Reader is free, it won't cost the user anything to get
top-quality documentation.
Jeffrey Thompson
>
> To: Roger Williams <roger@coelacanth.com> cc: gpg-list <g10@net.lut.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: Manual Contact
> > I think that this is only true if you assume that PDF == Windows. If
> > you instead start with good Postscript code, you'll end up with a good
> > PDF. PDF's flate compression will normally result in PDFs that are
> > *smaller* than the text original.
> >
> > For example, we write our technical documents in LaTeX (with LyX), but
> > usually have to convert them to PDF for distribution to our customers.
> > A typical 100-page specification might be a 400K TeX file, which
> > results in a 550K PS file, which gets converted (by pstill or ps2pdf)
> > to a 155K PDF (compared to 95K for the gzipped TeX file).
> > I think that the ability to distribute files in multiple formats is a
> > *good* thing -- and smgltools is a good way to do this -- but don't
> > knock PDFs on the basis of size or the need for Windoze or Adobe
> > Distiller, as neither of these assumptions is accurate.
> I stand corrected. :) I think that if we can produce an sgml version and
> then a postscript version that we can then pop out a pdf version.
> Everyone is then happy.
> From,
> Matthew M. Copeland