Reason for PDF Format

[Oscar Levi]

On Fri, Jan 29, 1999 at 12:45:01PM -0500, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> In message <4.1.19990129110556.009b79b0 at thompsonic.com>, Jeffrey Thompson write
> s:
> >The whole idea of going to a PDF file is to take advantage of the additional
> >features that are available through Adobe Acrobat, namely:
> 
> A bunch of gui-based featurebloated crap.
> 
> If I can't read the documentation through a text-only link, I won't read
> it.  At best, I'll convert it to a text-based format, more likely I'll
> just experiment with the program until it does what I want.
> 
> I'm sure I'm not the only one, especially on a project as hackerish as
> this.

I'd second this idea.  I believe the trend is to write docs in SGML
and output it to several different formats, including HTML, PDF, and
text.