[wellylug] TradeMe Linux jobs

Cliff Pratt enkidu at cliffp.com
Sun Jun 29 21:21:47 NZST 2008


Bruce Hoult wrote:
> 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.
> 
Hmm, I still incline to the view that the PDF format *as used by most 
people to publish data on the Internet* is a travesty and a tragedy 
perpetrated, if not by the Dark Side, then by the Dark Side's younger 
cousin.

Interesting that you said that "they *were* successful. It seems to me 
that the latest version of Adobe's software is almost designed to 
confuse - Distiller disappears and is now merely a part of a 'suite' of 
products, and, so far as I was able to determine, you can't buy just the 
Distiller-type component.

Cheers,

Cliff



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