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Re: current thoughts on PDF back end
From: |
Sebastien Pierre |
Subject: |
Re: current thoughts on PDF back end |
Date: |
Mon, 14 May 2001 20:34:15 +0400 (MSD) |
>> In conclusion, dropping the PDF back end will greatly reduce
>> Lout's advantage over other document formatting systems when it
>> comes to size and speed.
>
>I guess the problem are development resources. To make the PDF
>backend really useful, you would not only have to fix it, but you'd
>have to add support for diagrams, graphics inclusion, and font
>embedding (Type 1 and TrueType, including subsetting). I'd be all for
>it, but someone will have to write it, too...
Maybe PDF has more future than PS... I've followed the evolution of
this format vaguely through computer graphics magazines and I've
noticed that PDF is trying to prove it is a mature x-platform document
format, ready for the web and ready for the graphics and printing
people. When it comes to incorporating color graphics, links,
annotations, etc... PDF becomes really useful, and it has evolved to
satisfy some very peculiar problems we cannot really think about.
Moreover PDF is evoluting quite actively, and I'm not sure who
maintains PS (originally it was designed by Adobe, which is putting all
its efforts on PDF).
The issue that I am preoccupated with is wether PS will support Lout's
future improvements (which I do not know about). Personnaly I think
PDF,as the successor of PS, is a better platform for documents
especially because it is evolving towards the needs of people who
produce documents, and people who print them. I think PDF has metadata
support (like HTML's <meta ..> tags), because Google is able to
reference PDF documents, and PS seems not to have those features (at
least I've never seen google reference a PS doc).
PS was designed to be a unified language for printers, PDF is designed
to be a unified language for describing complex documents. So maybe
it's better to target information systems than printers (it's the
semantic web ;).
So my personal opinion is that the PDF backend should be ameliorated,
and I also agree with Martin's opinion: at school we have a f****ed up
GS installation which produce really garbled PS documents, so I have to
write PDF documents from Lout when I have to print a report, and I'm
glad to be able to edit/compile/view documents with only Vim,Lout and
XPdf. Luckily we have some space to put our preferred programs on the
school's servers, this wasn't the case in university. It's always cool
to be able to install a complete document chain in less than 10mb. But
as Michael said, it's a problem of resources: somebody will have to
write the code...
Sorry for this long mail ;)
Cheers,
Sébastien.
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, (continued)
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, Michael Piotrowski, 2001/05/13
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, David Duffy, 2001/05/13
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, Mikko Huhtala, 2001/05/14
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, bln, 2001/05/14
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, Christoph Breitkopf, 2001/05/14
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, Christian Mock, 2001/05/14
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, Sebastien Pierre, 2001/05/13
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end,
Sebastien Pierre <=
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, Jeff Kingston, 2001/05/14
- Re: current thoughts on PDF back end, Sebastien Pierre, 2001/05/15