10 Dec
2008
10 Dec
'08
8:35 a.m.
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.
It's also something like 600 pages; I question whether more than a
dozen people in the world grok more than tiny fractions of it.
How do you italicize, underline or bold with plain
text?
You don't, of course. The point is to transmit useful information, not
get pretty markup. (The point of datasheets, at least.)
Yes, PDFs can be evil, you can prevent the end user
from modifying,
copying, or printing the document.
No, you can't. You can just make it a little more difficult.
Yes, while working at a hedge fund many years ago, I
saw that someone
had written a DRM plug in for Acrobat (and Acrobat only at that) that
locked down documents for viewing only by specific machines.
Can't be done against a determined and skilled adversary; whatever the
application is using to check the machine identity can be fooled, if
necessary by a complete hardware emulation. The only way to get even
very close to this is to encrypt everything all the way through to the
display, and that depends on embedding a computer (with encryption keys
kept in tamper-"proof" hardware) in the display. Once the keys leak
(which they will, eventually), anything the in-display computer can do,
the attacker's software can do.
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.
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