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.





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