CCN presentation

On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 20:05:03 GMT, Simon Brooke <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

in message <[email hidden]>,

David Martin (') said:

That is because HTML is a content markup language, not a
display language. If you want accurately relayed
documents laid out exactly how you wish (with the
appropriate transparency and layering) then HTML doesn't
even come close. HTML is a poor reinvention of markup
languages and is a nasty thing. It does neither markup
nor display well. It was however free so got picked up
and used.

PDF is cross platform and open (though not free in the
GNU sense) and is an excellent way to transfer document
impressions (ie a combination of content and physical
layout).

The question PDF answers (and HTML doesn't) is 'What will
my document look like when YOU have printed it?'

Why on earth should that matter?

PDF is for document transfer, HTML is for formatting of
simple text in a web browser. Two totally different
purposes. If you print an HTML page it will not look like
it does on the screen, pretty useless if you want to give
someone a document. PDF on the other hand will look
exactly the same.

Quoted message said:

In any case, PDF does not answer even that question with
any precision.

Yes it does. A pdf will look the same printed as it does on
the screen.
--
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On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 09:05:17 GMT, Simon Brooke <[email hidden]>

wrote in message : said:

Can anybody explain to me why anyone ever uses Acrobat, or
why anyone thought it might have been a good idea in the
first place? It's the world's most incompetent, inflexible
and unusable data format.

Because it allows you to present data in the format you
want, including fonts and the like, ensuring that just about
everybody sees the same thing. It is the easiest and most
robust way of achieving this without using print.

In this case I used PDF because it was the most expedient
way of letting you see the presentation exactly as I see it
in my notes and handouts. Publishing the powerpoint show to
html gives an ugly any cumbersome frame-driven layout. Which
I could tidy up, but this is a quick hack, and the main data
is elsewhere, so I can't be arsed given that PDF is (a)
perfectly satisfactory for the purpose and (b) free and easy
to obtain (including being supported by a viewer in most
Linux distros).

Incompetent? Not in the least. You can use it for all sorts
of things, including sending high resolution output to
printers. Inflexible? In as much as it reduces the ability
to hack your text, yes, but that's not a bad thing.
Unusable? Far from it. I print to PDF in the same way as I
would print to my colour printer, and it takes less time.

--
Guy
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On Sat, 3 Apr 2004 17:10:58 +0100, "Ambrose Nankivell"
<[email hidden]> wrote in message
<[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Doh! Read this too late to get in touch. Would have been
nice to meet you.

de nada, another time. Met Rich for coffee at JD's (hi Rich)
and had a great day. The presentation was well received.

--
Guy
===
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Simon Brooke said:

in message <[email hidden]>,

BenS (') said:

You can't accurately duplicate any paper document in
HTML. You can in Acrobat.

Why would you want to?

Becasue the form is a standard form and needs to match a
layout of a conventional paper form but must be transmitted
electronically.

Because teh form replaces a form in an established layout
that people are used to

Because the document is such that the location of text on
the document encodes some part of the information
transmitted by teh document, but it is necesary to transmit
this electronically.

I have written pdf generators into dynamic intranet pages
for all three of these reasons. In at least one case (a
document control / issue matrix form) all three applied. PDF
generation is a little more complex than coding in
postscript (and not as much fun - I quite liked some of what
I have done in postscript in the past), but it's not wildly
difficult, and I can email teh result to (eg) Bangkok or
Bangor and be fairly confident that what they print and take
out on site will match what I thought I sent them.

regards, Ian SMith
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Just zis Guy said:

On Sat, 3 Apr 2004 17:10:58 +0100, "Ambrose Nankivell"
<[email hidden]> wrote in
message <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Doh! Read this too late to get in touch. Would have been
nice to meet you.

de nada, another time. Met Rich for coffee at JD's (hi
Rich) and had a great day. The presentation was well
received.

Who was it to?

John B

Simon Brooke said:

in message <RGDbc.1910$Sv1.20114473@news-
text.cableinet.net>, Ningi

(') said:

pdf format is pretty similar to compressed postscript.
The big advantages of pdf (and postscript) are that it's
a format which can accurately represent any document
electronically and formatted for printing on all
platforms. True WYSIWYG.

Modulo availability of fonts, availability of paper
sizes, availability of suitable paper stock, dot
resolution of screens/printers, colour correction, and a
multitude of other things;

All of which the 'modulo' only slightly.

Fonts: stick to the standard ones, and any compliant reader
will have them (that's in the standard).

Paper sizes: most readers will permit scaling to supply
either an extract at full size, or all the information at
changed size, at the operators discretion.

Stock, resolution and colour correction are all very small
effects irrelevant for the vast majority of documents using
the medium. If someone is using a format for a document to
which it is not suited, that's their own daft fault - but
pdf is much better match than html (that seems to be your
favoured alternative) in all teh respects you suggest.

Quoted message said:

and making no allowance for the quality of the
recipient's eyesight, for example. Take a technology
which is able to do things far more sophisticated than
paper, and to make documents accessable and usable to far
more people than paper documents are, and use it to
emulate paper documents badly.

Except that it's also a technology that is singuularly
useless in lots of situations.

Quoted message said:

For heaven's sake, this is as neanderthal as a fax
machine. Of use only to people too stupid to understand
what 'information' or 'a document'
is: people who think it's a particular arrangement of
marks on a piece of flattened dead tree.

Or those so stupid as to want to transmit information
rapidly to teh other side of teh world in a format that the
recipient can take down a muddy hole on a building site, for
instance? You'd have malaysian steel-fixers lugging a laptop
with wireless ethernet out into the mud so they can build
the pilecap cage, would you?

I don't really know what case you're trying to make - pdf
isn't suited for every use, but you seem to be championing a
format (html) that cannot even interchange between paper and
screen without chnaging the most basic of layout. That's a
major failing in a format in very many situations.

regards, Ian SMith
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Simonb said:

Except it's almost completely useless for voice readers.
In my book, that makes it highly undesirable. My son is
blind, and he benefits highly from well-designed markup.

Acrobat 6 has speech output options in both the free
reader and the full version. Look in the menu under
View/Read Out Loud.

Tony

On 3/4/04 9:05 pm, in article
[email hidden], "Simon Brooke"

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

You can't accurately duplicate any paper document in
HTML. You can in Acrobat.

Why would you want to?

Thats not the point. If you want to, you can with PDF, you
can't with HTML.

HTML is very good for many things. Knowing exactly what the
recipient sees when they look at the document you have sent
them is not one of them.

..d

On 3/4/04 9:05 pm, in article
[email hidden], "Simon Brooke"

Quoted message said:

in message <[email hidden]>,

David Martin (') said:

The question PDF answers (and HTML doesn't) is 'What will
my document look like when YOU have printed it?'

Why on earth should that matter?

I can think of many examples where I would like the document
to appear how I prepared it. I occasionally prepare
scientific posters. These fit a defined shape (e.g. A0). How
does HTML allow me to send the poster to the printer with
any guarantee that it will look how I intend it?

Answer: All the information will be there but the layout
(which IS important in this context) will be all to pot.
Sizes of font are not guaranteed so it may end up printed in
12 pt, hardly any good for someone wanting to read it from
several feet away.

Quoted message said:

In any case, PDF does not answer even that question with
any precision.

Yes it does given certain guarantees about the quality of
the output device.

..d

Quoted message said:

Why would you want to?

I don't wish to sound rude, but stop being so bloody
obtuse. I already gave you an answer to that - one of many
possible answers.

To quote myself: "eg, you are sending Quark Xpress documents
to a client for proofreading/approval"

In case you didn't get that, let me spell it out...

People use computers to produce magazines these days, doncha
know, and Quark Xpress and Adobe Indesign are the industry
standard software packages for laying out magazine pages.
Well, say you want to send a page produced in Quark Xpress
to a client for approval. Pdf provides a quick and easy way
to electronically transmit the page in a format that
accurately represents what the page will look like in the
finished magazine. (Just export it from Quark as a pdf and
attach it to an email - could hardly be easier.)

Even if you could reproduce the page layout accurately with
html (which you can't) you would also have to ensure that
the person viewing the page had all the correct fonts (and
hadn't set their browser to override them) and you'd also
have to include all the images from the page as well - so
it's questionable whether the size of the final web page
would be genuinely any smaller than the pdf anyway.

The really simple version of all of the above is: people in
the real world still have use for printed matter but they
like to be able to send it electronically for the recipient
to print out pristinely at their end (because it's quicker
than posting it and less messy than faxing it).

Hope this helps!

d.

Quoted message said:

But then the question arises: should it have to? Plain
text and well-constructed HTML have served us well -- so
why should we have to

change

Quoted message said:

to accommodate a format which is designed for visual
consumption?

You're not comparing like with like. The point of pdf
documents is not for them to be read in their electronic
form, that's just for ease of transmission and storage - pdf
documents are meant to be consumed in print, and thus are
better compared to books and magazines. Do you rail against
books and magazines because your software can't read them
for you? Or do you just look to get the content in a more
suitable format?

Yes, some halfwits put web content in pdf documents, but
saying pdfs are therefore useless is like saying it's all
chocolate's fault when some idiot decides to make a teapot
out of the stuff.

d.

Quoted message said:

Because it allows you to present data in the format you
want, including fonts and the like, ensuring that just
about everybody sees the same thing.

Those that *can* see. This is where I have a lot of sympathy
for Simon's point of view.

d.

Quoted message said:

Of use only to people too stupid to understand what
'information' or 'a document'
is: people who think it's a particular arrangement of
marks on a piece of flattened dead tree.

I've read your other comments on this subject and tried to
take into account in my replies that you just don't know
what you're talking about. But now you're just being
offensive. Please stop it immediately or I won't be so
polite in my next response.

d.

davek said:

Those that *can* see. This is where I have a lot of
sympathy for Simon's point of view.

d.

Since the reader now has both voice and braille output as
standard where is the problem? I'm not aware of many HTML
browsers having that built in as standard.

Tony

On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 00:26:52 +0000 (UTC), "davek"
<[email hidden]> wrote in message
<[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Because it allows you to present data in the format you
want, including fonts and the like, ensuring that just
about everybody sees the same thing.

Quoted message said:

Those that *can* see. This is where I have a lot of
sympathy for Simon's point of view.

Jaws reads PDFs perfectly well. My bike mechanic is blind, I
have seen him use this.

--
Guy
===
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after
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88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at
Washington University

On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 22:33:43 +0100, JohnB <[email hidden]> wrote in
message <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Who was it to?

Cycle Campaign Network

--
Guy
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88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at
Washington University

Quoted message said:

I'm not aware of many HTML browsers having that built in
as standard.

No. But people very poor eyesight use specialised software
which reads plain text and properly-designed HTML.

On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 00:11:21 +0000 (UTC), "davek"
<[email hidden]> wrote in message
<[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Pdf provides a quick and easy way to electronically
transmit the page in a format that accurately represents
what the page will look like in the finished magazine.
(Just export it from Quark as a pdf and attach it to an
email - could hardly be easier.)

They can also mark it up electronically and turn it
round using software which costs a fraction of the price
of the Quark and runs on much more modest hardware. My
wife is a technical author; this feature is a core part
of what she does.

--
Guy
===
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after
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88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at
Washington University

Simon Brooke said:

Dearly beloved, what is 'a document'? Why does the
precise rendition of it matter two hoots?

For lots of reasons, many of which have been supplied to you
as examples, all of which you have chosen, in your
perverseness, to ignore.

No-one but you is advocating using a medium unsuited to its
role. You, with your insistence on using html regardless of
how suited it is, are.

regards, Ian SMith
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Simon Brooke said:

Dearly beloved, what is 'a document'? Why does the precise
rendition of it matter two hoots?

For that matter why bother with language or grammar or
spelling or anything. Isn't one of your complaints that
it doesn't do a precise rendition through your text to
speech programme - or does precise rendition only matter
in that context.

Quoted message said:

Sorry, one of the things which really gets my back up -
people using new technology without understanding it:
trying to make it do (badly) what medieval technology did
well, while ignoring the potential benefits the newer
technology could offer.

Acrobat is hardly new technology. I blame Caxton myself

Tony