14 Dec
2008
14 Dec
'08
8:45 a.m.
der Mouse wrote:
That's because ghostscript is based on a long-obsolete version of the
standard, as far as I can see
That's fine, if you want to stick with bloated plain-text documents and
live without usable searching, indexes, annotations and bookmarking.
Please stop railing against the rest of us, who have moved onto better
things.
Gordon
IMHO, I think
PDF is wonderful. It does a far better job than HTML
at rendering documents.
Indeed it does. If good-looking results is what I want, I'll pick PDF
over plain text every time. (I don't see what HTML has to do with it.)
But the job of datasheets is not to look pretty; it's to transmit
information usably.
It's an open standard.
...which, apparently, most PDF creaters don't follow. I can't remember
the last time I looked at PDF for which ghostscript didn't give me its
"please notify the author of the code that produced this that it's not
conforming to Adobe's published spec" warning. In at least one of
those cases, it was an Adobe application - or, at least, the
application name string claimed it was. Blaming the
tools is silly. Nobody is forcing anyone to use a hammer
with to nail a screw, especially when screwdrivers exist.
I'm not blaming the tool. I'm blaming the chip makers for using the
tool inappropriately. PDFs are fine for cases where presentation is
important compared to content. Chip datasheets are not such a case.