Re: [Cheetahtemplate-discuss] Misc

[Chuck E. <Chu...@ya...>]

At 11:07 AM 6/9/2001 -0700, Mike Orr wrote:
>Why do you like PDF over Postscript, Chuck?  I find Postscript much *more*

That vast majority of computer users have Windows & Mac, neither of which 
have a good PS solution the last time I checked, but both of which have 
good, free PDF viewers.


>portable than PDF.  PDF requires a custom viewer to be installed, it can

Both PDF and PS require viewers.


>be difficult to install and/or crash and/or produce an almost-blank or
>unreadable page depending on the file and the encryption and the version
>of xpdf/acroread, and which libraries happen to be on the computer you're

You're the first person I've heard complain that PDF is not portable. 
Perhaps you had a bad experience with a specific program? If I were using 
Linux as my desktop (and I did at one point) I could make pretty much the 
same statement you made for web browsing. But then I would never suggest 
that HTML was the problem. It was Netscape & Mozilla.


>sitting in front of.  Also, you can't run psnup and psselect on it (or
>can you?) to get only certain pages or all the even-numbered pages or
>to reformat it to 2-column landscape, and you can't just view it as text
>to write your own tools with.  (For instance, I wrote a tool to display
>the number of pages in a .ps document.)  If people wouldn't write PDFs
>with proprietary commercial tools that expect that "everyone" has the
>same tools and environment to read it on, PDF could perhaps be a standard.

AFAIK PDF is already a standard. Numerous web sites including the IRS 
manage to distribute a lot of information via PDF.

If the problem is what tools are used to generate it with, then it seems we 
as the suppliers can avoid the problem.


-Chuck