30 Jan
2005
30 Jan
'05
11:06 a.m.
Jules Richardson wrote:
Back to the PDF problem, I still don't follow the
*why*. Sure, modern
PCs generally have Acrobat reader installed. But even more machines than
that can read postscript, and even more than that still can handle a
bunch of TIFF images (I'm talking about scanned image data here of
course, not plain text).
You must be talking from the position of a *nix user. In the Windows world --
where, like it or not, much of our newbie target audience is -- it is nearly
impossible to view a .ps but is almost universally possible to view a .pdf.
And if someone receives a bunch of images and is
desperate for PDF, then
they obviously have a machine capable of handling PDF, and therefore
running the various free tools that'll create PDF files from images.
That is one of the MISuses of PDF. PDF should not be used as a container for
bitmap images. PDF *should* be used for text-only documents, or documents
lightly mixed with graphics (preferably resolution-independant vector/line-art).
In case it wasn't obvious, PDF *is* Postscript! It's *portable* postscript.
I'm not anti-PDF at all; in some situations
it's very useful (much
better than a Word doc, say) - but for scanned pages relating to classic
hardware it seems the wrong choice.
If the scanned pages cannot be OCR'd then I completely agree. And it is at
this point that I believe I am arguing for PDF for a poster that is not
yourself :-) I should know better than to jump into threads where I can't see
the top post ;-)
The best format for mixed text and graphics that do NOT need to be indexed (ie
converted to text) is DjVu ("DejaVu"). DjVu is a mixed-type format that keeps
a B&W image of the text and a color or grayscale image of everything else in
the same file, and each layer is compressed with a method appropriate to their
content type. Unfortunately, the best DjVu tools cost significant money, so it
hasn't taken off. I haven't used it beyond a few experiments myself.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter(a)oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/
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