Re: lynx-dev Lynx problems

[David Woolley]

> May I as why? (not use PDF, that is). We have been thinking of offering
> our Repair FAQ's in PDF format somewhat to prevent ccontent-messing along

I think the reasons are:

1) it is not Microsoft, and they believe MS has won in our market area;
2) they don't want the support implications of distributing Acrobat Reader;
3) our target market is not very technical; PDF's main use seems to be 
   engineering, but not commercial software engineering - we provide
   a business infrastructure support application for typically, financial
   institutions, public utilities and universities.

> the way but mainly to ease printing them in a "book" format (since, for
> example, Sam's VCR repair FAQ is ~200 pages). Right now we have it as

That is certainly an area where PDF is common.

> HTML segmented, HTML one file, and TEXT print. I'm wondering if your
> marketing people have some stats or "rumors" that I don't. Is PDF
> going to be replaced by something better? Soon?

I don't think they have spotted anything better, I think they just don't
think there is much awareness of it in our market (relatively few people
in our company have it installed, even of those who've heard of it).

> 
> Oh, is that utility you're writing GNU or $$$? :-)

It's actually only a small awk script (I'd have used Perl, but that's
also taboo).  I'm not sure of the IPR issues on this one.  I wouldn't
sell it, but not sure if it would be safe to give it away - the risk is
the company might take it up and demand ownership under my employment
contract.  What I could probably safely do is describe the logic.

NB This was for creating PDF on the fly with low processing resources.  If
you want to create fixed files, you would probably be better using ghostscript
5.10.  This will do Deflate compression on text (but not yet graphics) and
can cope with a large range of postscript constructs, not just mono-spaced,
single font, text.  I haven't used Distiller, but my understanding is that
the main weaknesses of ghostscript are: no image compression; and it bit
maps fonts which are not in the 14 standard Postscript fonts.

Incidentally, in my view, most commercial web sites would have been much
better done in PDF than Postscript, as they are largely trying to have
page description language type layout control.