9 Dec
2008
9 Dec
'08
12:38 p.m.
However, for documentation, I still believe PDF has
advantages, if
one wants to print the documentation out.
It doubtless does. It also has disadvantages.
Personally, the major disadvantage is how involved it is to turn a PDF
into something that can be thrown at a printer. Text is easy; PDFs
are..more involved. (I've tried using pdf2ps and got such uniformly
crappy results that I now render all the way to bitmaps and pnmtops
them. Slow and disk-hungry, but it produces good enough quality for
9up printouts to be usable.)
Still, on the specific topic (datasheets), text is
just not
appropriate.
Strongly disagree. I often end up (manually) processing the (printed)
PDF into a text file, which I then use for whatever it is I'm doing.
searching
Most of the PDF readers have search. not having to
run multiple megabytes through a dial-up line to get a
few pages of text
I'm not sure how any format besides straight text will solve
this, and the text conversion will lose important
information from these
files.
Like what? Manufacturer logos??
I keep seeing this claimed. It's definitely not true for most, in many
case all, of the information in the data sheets I've seen. (Unless
it's done badly, of course, but anything looks bad if it's done badly.)
Sorry, I don't buy it.
You don't have to.
PDFs annoy me, and apparently others, because they are inconvenient for
us. Your agreement - or even understanding - is irrelevant to that.
Thus, I can't accept that a mere format issue is
of any concern to
the members of this list.
It concerns me, and apparently others.
Your acceptance or lack thereof of that fact - and it is a fact - is of
no relevance as far as I can see. Your inability to get your head
around our circumstances, preferences, whatever, is not _our_ problem.
Text is no longer the document format of choice,
it's PDF.
Choice of chip makers, yes. That's where we came in.
PDFs are an inconvenient delivery format for documentation for some
people, such as me. There probably are a few cases where there isn't
anything better, but certainly for the stuff I've seen - including a
lot of chip data sheets; I've got well over an inch of printed data
sheets - I'm having trouble thinking of anything that text wouldn't do
almost as well for, and damn few it wouldn't do better for.
It's certainly more portable - the number of systems that can handle
plain text but not PDFs, while small as a percentage of total systems
in use, is substantially greater than the converse.
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