[wellylug] TradeMe Linux jobs

Bruce Hoult bruce at hoult.org
Sun Jun 29 20:01:41 NZST 2008


On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Mark Foster <blakjak at blakjak.net> wrote:
>
>> Trying to restrict the user to just those fonts and exactly the layout
>> that you designed into it is, IMO, arrogant and inflexible.
>
> Uhh...
>
> If it's a document I designed then I damn well want it to look like I
> intended it. It's MY DESIGN after all.
>
> PDF is by far the best way to achieve this.  And indeed, the PDF's you get
> which are effectively 'scanned images' achieve this...
>
> PDF still seems to be - in my humble experience - the best way to preserve
> the desired formatting.

Exactly.

And while PDF originates from an Evil Corporation, it is a published
standard, with no license fees to create it or to view it.  And the
specification is concise, logical and mathematical in its purity.
Unlike some others, it is not an after the fact reverse engineering of
how the original implementation just happens to work, bugs and all.

Of course Adobe would love to sell you lots of expensive tools to
create and manipulate PDF files, but they back themselves to do it
honorably via superior programming skills and top quality
implementation (derived from their previous experience with
PostScript, which has the same imaging model), not by trickery.  And
for some years they were successful in this.



More information about the wellylug mailing list