on Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 11:12:37AM +0200, Dr Olaf Kruse (olaf.kruse@VST-GMBH.DE) wrote: > My two cents: > > I don't second the warnings about excessive use of pdf-files, even > if the usability-argument ist right. In my experience, pdf-files are mainly > used to replace other file-types like *.dvi, *.ps or even worse > MS-Word/Excel/Powerpoint and _not_ html/Hypertext-files. An I rather > (down)-load a 200 KB pdf-file than a 1.000 KB MS-Word-file (or even > have this particular file not posted at all) and get the viewer for free! > > And I really appreciate the same-look-on-every-device- and > no-manipulating-by-a-third-party-features of pdf-files !!

I second the preference for open standard file formats over closed proprietary ones. Though GNU/Linux provides a number of tools for quickly rendering MSFT *.DOC and *.PPT files to ASCII text (catdoc and strings, respectively). Those who send me such files will get flat text in response. Postscript, by contrast, *is* an open standard, is largely uniform across platforms, and is widely supported (though, of course, not natively on Legacy MS Windows though apps are freely available, see below).

The first of the two features you mention is offered (largely) by postscript files. The limitations are largely similar: any interpreted display will introduce some differentiation to the output. Pagination and paragraph layout can largely be expected to remain the same.

PDF provides additional features such as searchability (unless someone can point me to a postscript viewer offering text search), hyperlinks, thumbnails, etc. However, in balance, I find that only one of these features (search) is a benefit, and the default navigation and display of PDFs is worse that that of PS documents. The processing overhead of PDF is significantly higher than for reading a postscript document.

I routinely convert PDFs to PS for reading, and to text if I need to search the document. My preferred PS reader is 'gv' under GNU/Linux. Aladdin Software (L. Peter Deutsch) provides a set of utilities for use under Legacy MS Windows, I think you can find them at

ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/

Note that the document "locking" features of PDF are largely bypassable by users. Conversion to a postscript file (a precondition to printing) will allow extraction of text from the postscript file if not from the source PDF. I generally question the intent of those who do attempt to do this in the first place -- it's a largely misguided effort.

-- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org Are these opinions my employer's? Hah! I don't believe them myself!