OT: PDF vs PS Was: [newbie] Printing
Richard A. O'Keefe
ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz
Tue Sep 12 03:07:32 UTC 2000
Aaron Thieme <ghede at well.com> wrote in response to my pointing out
that PDF documents that actually exist are not terribly portable:
As someone who has had had to create dozens of PDF documents for
our website, I would submit that this is generally the fault of
the person who created the PDF, not the format itself. There
are multiple ways to create PDFs from documents, and some are
definitely superior to others. Distiller in particular is quite
configurable as far as how fonts are treated during the creation
process.
Let me turn that around: if you don't build a PDF file just right,
you are likely to use one of the "definitely INFERIOR" ways, and your
PDF files will not work for other people. It shouldn't be that easy
to do the wrong thing.
What this means for Squeak is that
(a) whoever does the PDFWriter for Squeak had better be an expert in
how to do it right
(b) it will need extensive testing to see if it works for other people
(in particular, for people who have never even seen US paper and for
people who do not have Squeak's fonts, and of course the well known
"Arial-on-a-Mac is not Arial-on-a-PC" problem.)
(c) it still won't be trusted by people who've had their fingers burned
with PDF in the past
(d) if Squeak made it easy for people to generate *good* PDF, that might
be a good selling point for Squeak.
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|