Re: Plain text output

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 12:50:30 +0200, RaЗl NЗЯez de Arenas Coronado wrote:

> I use pstotext, but I wanted to test the plain text backend of lout.

User's Guide is not the best example of a document you want to run
through the plain text backend.  It contains a lot of graphics and a
lot of "big" objects that don't fit well on a plain text page.
E.g. vi(1) is not the best tool to edit binaries, but that doesn't
imply vi(1) is useless.  (I use emacs, of course :).


> Anyway, my humble oppinion is that backend doesn't worth the effort,
> since it's sometimes easier to transform PS files to any other
> formats, using other tools.  They're useful, but really don't
> needed.

It sometimes easier to transform PS, but sometimes it's not.  There
are "scripting-challenged" systems like win9x where, last time I
checked, ps2pdf.bat will not work out of the box, for example.  Also,
ps2pdf is not without its own quirks.  E.g. while it works good for
Lout output, it produces really crappy PDFs when presented with groff
output.  E.g. ps file size 321325 -> pdf file size 588984.  It's just
by a lucky coincidence that Lout generates PS the way that ps2pdf can
process without bloating the file.


> Yes, of course, but it's easier to run pstotext ;)))

Well in this particular example, I just grep sources for the User's
Guide or search PDF in acroreader.  ;)

SY, Uwe
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