<html>
<font size=3>The whole idea of going to a PDF file is to take advantage
of the additional features that are available through Adobe Acrobat,
namely:<br>
- Improved illustrations<br>
- Improved type-setting: stuff that comes out of TeX
isn't the best quality <br>
in my opinon. It isn't easy to read
on-line. Maybe printed out it's OK, but <br>
I want an easy to read online, top quality,
book. <br>
- You get a lot of other additional, instructional features
in Adobe Acrobat <br>
you simply won't get by producing a PDF via sgml
translators <br>
(color illustrations, audio, video, hypertext within
the document and <br>
hypertext links to the Internet).<br>
<br>
By producing a PDF by translating from sgml, you simply miss the whole
point of producing a PDF in the first place.<br>
<br>
Since the Adobe Acrobat Reader is free, it won't cost the user anything
to get top-quality documentation. <br>
<br>
Jeffrey Thompson<br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite cite><table border=0>
<tr><td width=780>To: Roger Williams <roger@coelacanth.com> cc:
gpg-list <g10@net.lut.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Manual
Contact</td></tr>
</table>
> I think that this is only true if you assume that PDF == Windows. If
<br>
> you instead start with good Postscript code, you'll end up with a
good <br>
> PDF. PDF's flate compression will normally result in PDFs that are
<br>
> *smaller* than the text original. <br>
> <br>
> For example, we write our technical documents in LaTeX (with LyX),
but <br>
> usually have to convert them to PDF for distribution to our
customers. <br>
> A typical 100-page specification might be a 400K TeX file, which
<br>
> results in a 550K PS file, which gets converted (by pstill or
ps2pdf) <br>
> to a 155K PDF (compared to 95K for the gzipped TeX file).<br>
> I think that the ability to distribute files in multiple formats is
a <br>
> *good* thing -- and smgltools is a good way to do this -- but don't
<br>
> knock PDFs on the basis of size or the need for Windoze or Adobe
<br>
> Distiller, as neither of these assumptions is accurate.<br>
I stand corrected. :) I think that if we can produce an sgml version and
<br>
then a postscript version that we can then pop out a pdf version. <br>
Everyone is then happy. <br>
From, <br>
Matthew M. Copeland</font></blockquote></html>