Date   : Mon, 04 Nov 2002 06:52:38 -0800
From   : Angus Duggan <angus.duggan@...>
Subject: Re: Which format do you want BBC manuals in? RTF/HTML

Paul Wheatley writes:
>Have you considered Latex? Thats a better archival format than PDF as you can 
>easily move it to other formats (including PDF to view it if required). With 
>PDF, you're a little more tied in.

Not at all. LaTeX documents are notoriously difficult to reproduce because of
differences in style files, dependencies on separates diagrams, etc. The
advantage is the source text is easy to modify.

>Having said that, PDF seems to be a popular archival format at the moment. 
>Personally I'm not exactly sure why tho...

It's a *single file*, searchable, format that will reproduce pretty similarly
on many devices. LaTeX and PDF serve different purposes. For a final copy of
a document, I'd always select PDF, and keep LaTeX for the original source
copies.

I've switched to PDF for all of my BBC documentation a while ago. I've not
had anyone complain yet.

a.