manuals in pdf (resolution, compression)

Personally? Because it has all of the disadvantages of PostScript (not easily usable with plain-text tools, mostly) and more (usually the whole thing is comparessed so it's not at all usable with plain-text tools). Because (when the PDF is just a bunch of images, as with most scanned manuals) it's often relatively difficult to extract individual pages' images to do anything useful with them. Because it's annoying to have to print it out in order to get something readable without strain (at typical font sizes, characters are only ten or so pixels high, and reading text at that size when the font has not been bitmap-tuned for it, is a strain). Now that I've been pointed at ps2ascii (which contrary to its name does work on PDFs), some of the disadvantages of PDFs are alleviated - for PDFs that contain text as opposed to image-per-page scans.... /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B