Date : Thu, 07 Nov 2002 18:24:21 +0000
From : Paul Wheatley <p.r.wheatley@...>
Subject: Re: Which format do you want BBC manuals in? RTF/HTML
Pete Turnbull wrote:
> On Nov 5, 10:51, Paul Wheatley wrote:
>
>>Pete Turnbull wrote:
>>
>>>On Nov 4, 14:38, Paul Wheatley wrote:
>>
>>>>Have you considered Latex? Thats a better archival format than PDF
>>>
>
>>>That wouldn't be my first choice, as it's a pain to obtain all the
>>
> software
>
>>>and fonts and set them up, and PDF exists for more platforms than LaTeX
>>>does. PDF is also better at handling graphics, more likely to deal
>>>correctly with fonts (unless you go to a lot of trouble to get decent
>>
> LaTeX
>
>>>fonts), is inherently compressed and therfore more space efficient, and
>>>usually easier to view.
>>
>
>>The crucial thing about a good archive format is that its easy to get the
>>data back out. With PDF that isn't the case.
>
>
> Not necessarily true. PDF isn't "one format", it's a set of rules which
> allow lots of things to be encoded into one file. It's possible to scan a
> document, OCR the image, and include both the image (normally with TIFF 6
> compression, which is pretty good) and the text in the same PDF file. Thus
> you have a document which is both accurate in appearance, and searchable;
> and from which the text can be extracted (at least, so I'm told -- I've
> never had to try).
I guess thats the key issue. We've established that there a lots of PDF
*viewers* but what programs are there to export from PDF to something else?
My concern is that once you move to PDF you're tied to Adobe software and
whatever they decide to do with it and the PDF format.
>
> There have been a lot of discussions about this on the ClassicCmp mailing
> list over the last few years, where there are lots of people doing a lot of
> archive stuff (much more than for the BBC), and the concensus there seems
> to be for PDF or flat ASCII (the latter because it makes very small files
> that are easy to read on *anything*, including Beebs and old CP/M etc
> systems).
>
> As for the software, there are PDF readers for most platforms with graphics
> capability (including RISC OS, Amiga OS, Mac OS, AIX, VMS, etc, not just
> Unix and relations), and free software for a variety of systems that can
> turn TIFF or PostScript or text and other sources into PDF. GhostScript
> can do it, if I remember correctly, and there are also some libraries like
> pdflib that do it (admittedly most of the ones I know of run on Windows or
> some flavour of Unix, but then so does most of the scanning and OCR
> software).
>
> PostScript is about as widely supported as PDF, but it's hard to
> incorporate both the text and a matching TIFF (or whatever) image -- you
> tend to get one or the other -- and it isn't always searchble (PostScript
> sometimes splits up words where you might not expect it).
>
> LaTeX is less well supported, harder to search reliably (at least with
> simple tools, again because of the embedded commands), and poor at images.
> It's also hard to read the common Computer Modern fonts on most displays
> -- they're meant for high-res output devices, not monitors. It's a good
> choice for preserving the source of documents which are to be printed, but
> not for browsing or on-screen display, providing you remember to also
> preserve all the separate files that contain macros, etc. A complete LaTeX
> document of any complexity is hardly ever a single file. It's also worth
> noting that it's losing ground to Word even for academic documents these
> days (a seriously retrograde step, IMNSHO).
>
> Of course, there's nothing to stop an archive from keeping things in two
> formats, and some do. I've seen places where the flat-ASCII content is
> stored alongside the PDF.
That was my original arguement in support of Latex - its very easy to produce
PDF or HTML from the Latex.
Paul
>
--
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