Date : Thu, 07 Nov 2002 19:53:26 -0000
From : "Colin" <cwhill@...>
Subject: Re: Which format do you want BBC manuals in? RTF/HTML
As a few of us have said, although Acrobat is the usual free reader, there
are a few PDF writers available for free on the web - Ghostscript and PDF995
which have both been mentioned here. Nobody seems to have commented on
them - is there a particular reason that this free stuff is no good?
With the advent of CDR, most forms of archiving can be stored on them and
then re-done if something better comes along . Are you thinking of
specifically Acorn archive or just a method of making available to others on
the web? (ie Acorn v Windows). I would presume that most people would have
Windows on their PC anyway regardless of what they use an Acorn for. That's
a thought - can you use BBC/Acorn for internet access - I never thought of
that being an Electron user.
Colin Hill
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Wheatley" <p.r.wheatley@...>
Cc: "BBC Mailing List" <bbc-micro@...>
Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] 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
>
> >
>
>
> --
> UK Project Manager
> CAMiLEON
> http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/
> http://www.leeds.ac.uk/camileon
> 0113 343 5830
>
>