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Tom Potts wrote: > I agree - for Paper Documents - its lousy on a screen*. > However if, as someone else said, you want your paragraph in a certain font > then you have to embed all the fonts in your document - that ends up with a > severely bloated document. My recollection of a "seminar" I attended many many years ago, certainly before most people had heard of PDF and probably before a lot of people had heard of HTML, was that the entire point of PDF was that it should render exactly the same way as the originator intended irrespective of the medium. That's why it's necessary to embed fonts etc. It's as much concerned with presentation as content (in fact, I think I'd probably argue that it's *more* concerned with presentation than content). A corollary of this is that there are a whole range of display devices which are wholly unsuited to displaying PDF because they just don't provide the necessary functionality. Some authors actually don't care about that because it's more important to them that the document should render exactly the way they require it to and their attitude is that if you can't view it by some method that allows it to do so, tough. That said, I don't think it's a valid criticism of PDF. On the other hand, if people are using PDF where it's important that the content should display on any device, I'd say they're probably using the wrong format. I generally find a lot of people recognise the difference and provide both PDF and HTML versions of documents to allow the reader to use whichever is appropriate. There's possibly an argument that if a document renders sensibly as HTML then there may be no need for a PDF form, but actually sometimes I find PDF easier to read on-screen than HTML. > And if you want me to read a paper formatted document send it to me in paper > form. Why should I have to pay to kill a tree to read your document. You're > not microsoft you know! > * why should I buy a huge screen so I can make sense of your documents? Your > not going to be able to read many PDF documents easily on the Eee but the > same information in an HTML document will be legible to many. I think that may be a personal preference thing. I have a 1280x1024 display, not large by any standards, and read a lot of PDF documentation on-screen. The last thing I recall printing out (a couple of years ago) was hundreds of pages of technical documentation for a VoIP->PSTN interface where I wanted to compare pages side-by-side -- something I'd not have been able to do on-screen no matter what the distribution format. James -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html