Including the monitor and the license fees for all the necessary bits of software? And including someone to be its sysadmin? I'm certainly not about to baby along a machine running closed-source software. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Does Acrobat run under any of the open-source ones? Is Acrobat itself free (at least as-in-beer)? And I'm still not about to sink my own time into the rathole of sysadminning the machine, not with closed-source software on it (even if the OS is open). ...so? None of my machines, classic or not, run the OS they came with (if any); I'm here for the hardware, not the software, side of things. (When I have the OS, I have a copy of it archived, but I don't do anything with them; they're against the day when I do find a reason to, or for a putative someone else.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Easily? Which of those "several open source packages" includes a scriptable (ie, command-line) tool to extract the embedded images from a PDF? (Not to render them and give the resulting rendered image, but to extract the image itself.) Certainly ghostscript couldn't last time I looked. Without that, I can't consider it fair to say that I can "easily handle PDFs", since that's the second most common thing I want to do with PDFs. (The first most common is to convert to PostScript for printing, which ghostscript does do a reasonably good job of.) Perhaps you see no difference between running classic closed-source software on a classic machine with no networking, often no connection to anything else, and running modern closed-source software on a modern machine with a network link. I, on the other hand, see many differences, at least a few of which would be relevant for me if I had any machines to which the question even applied. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

That's a rather peculiar suggestion. Now you have me curious - why would you think that I'd consider hand copying the best of the available non-PDF alternatives? /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

There is a third alternative, that being to copy the paper documents directly onto paper, as a traditional photocopier does, and distribute the copies. Agreed. Well, first there's the question of *whether* to keep them packaged, but I'll grant you this one. (There are some uses for scans of isolated pages or other small fractions of the whole document, but they're limited.) And here we are at the crux of the matter: it appears you inhabit an alternative universe in which all the other methods of keeping page scans packaged have been forgotten. (What other methods? To name just three, (1) put the files in the same directory; (2) a zip file; (3) a tar file, optionally compressed.) Thank you. That cleared up my puzzlement effectively. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

That's true, I extended what you wrote to sharing documents in general, rather than demanding that the sharing take place over the Internet. That was sloppy of me, and thank you for calling me on it. I think we have good evidence in this very thread that PDFs *aren't* universal. (I don't doubt they are considered universal by some people; those people are wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that anyone who considers *any* format as universal is, strictly, wrong - there probably are a few people who can't do anything useful with even as widely supported a format as plain text.) Your use of the passive voice is clever. You are hiding a great deal with it, but I'm not going to let you get away with it. Specifically, By whom? I listed three alternative packagings; you have given no evidence to support your implicit claim that they are not accepted or that they are not considered universal - claims that are impossible to refute because you have not specified by whom they are putatively "accepted" or "considered". Presumably you will claim existence proofs by example, most likely with yourself as the example, in that you do not accept other packagings, and you do consider PDFs universal - but so what? You may be willing to use yourself as the touchstone of format approval, but I doubt very many other people will. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

You don't. You use this wonderful invention called snail-mail, which for me is certainly cheaper and probably quicker than downloading a pdf file. In your opinion. Actually, it doesn't matter if a format is considered to be universal, only that both sender and receiver agree on it. You seem to think this is a good thing. I don't. Many times I've rearranged the sections of a paper document, added extra pages (with my own notes), and the like. I don't see why not being able to do this to a pdf file is a Good Thing. Anyway, once a pdf file is printed out, much of this is lost. And printing is about all you can do with a file of scanned images. -tony

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, Randy McLaughlin wrote: Except that it rarely (if ever) self destructs with time. BIG difference. Shave your head and buy a fricken robe while you're at it. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

Rumor has it that Vintage Computer Festival may have mentioned these words: And it doesn't *have* to be a bloated giant; only the prepackaged versions are. If you want your own, whip out LFS and recompile it *any way you like.* Yes, there are still versions that can fit on a pair of floppies -- no HD required! Yup. =-=-=-=-=-=-= Speaking of whiny people whining about Closed-Source OSs and whining those whiny computers/OSs won't open whiny PDFs... Who has a version of MicroWare's OS-9 68K that'll run on an Atari ST? ;-) Laterz, "Merch" -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers zmerch at 30below.com What do you do when Life gives you lemons, and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????

From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 6:22 PM I did not call you an idiot what I said and meant is that it is idiot/crazy to ask others to create a document that only a tiny percentage of the population could do anything with. All methods of packaging documents have draw-backs, PDF's have the fewest. More people can handle the point and click of PDF's than any other format. Even if PDF's were limited to Windoze the simple concept that the likelyhood of the documents being read in the future is worth using it. I am happy that there are many open source tools that make PDF's available to almost 100% of the computing population. So far I've only heard of three people with internet access that have no way of handling PDF's. PDF's are not the only way of distributing docs, snail mail oriented people like Herb Johnson are available to help many. I am surprised that no one has started a small cottage industry and offer to mail printed copies of PDF's, there are a couple of people offering to snail mail CD's/DVD's full of PDF's. Most of my PDF's can be downloaded in 30 minutes or less via dial up modems. Randy www.s100-manuls.com

der Mouse wrote: If you have a "need" for extracting images from PDF than you are missing the point of PDF. If you can view it and print it you have no need to extract images from it. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

Paul Koning wrote: But that's not your domain/responsibility. The PDF should have been perfect by the time it got to you -- PDF is a final end-destination format. If the scans needed touching up, they shouldn't have made it into a PDF in the first place. I think the real "problem" people have here with PDF files is with *BAD* PDF files -- files created by people who were sloppy or didn't pay attention. I don't distribute something in PDF until I've cleaned it up AND OCR'd it so that the text is text and the pictures are pictures (and yes, I proofread the doc before I make it available). There's anothing wrong with PDF; blame the PDF creators. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

That's a nice-sounding theory, but it is wrong. You do not know better than I what I have need to do with PDFs. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

And that is what I (and others) have been saying all along: please don't shove scans into a PDF! It thus assumes there will never be any reason to pull it apart. Even if the information *is* perfect, that is often false. That's exactly what we have been doing - or more precisely, we've been blaming those who chose PDF as the format for distributing documentation scans. Since no format will be perfect for all uses, choosing a packaging format which is designed around the assumption that the package will never be pulled apart is..broken. Usually, to postprocess the page scan for better results, whatever "better" means at the moment in question. For example, a page scan may have a different white point on one side than the other, and I may want to remove that bias before printing. I may want to take a greyscale-scanned page and convert it to bilevel for printing (the printer's conversion, usually by dithering, will not always be the best for what I want). I may want to throw the scan at some OCR technology. I may even want to just look at it, or part of it, on-screen - if you think PDF displayers are always at least as good at displaying scanned page images as programs designed for image display, you have either an unrealistically good impression of PDF displayers or an unrealistically bad impression of image displayers. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

...and all of a sudden instead of discussing PDF's actual merits or lack thereof, you shift to discussing whether it's popular. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'd rather have PDFs tha nothing. Documentation in a difficult-to-use format is better than no documentation at all. But if we're discussing the pros and cons of various formats, then it *is* appropriate to criticize brokennesses in the formats under discussion. Only one, so far, and the directory full of bzip2ed scan files is only some 42 megs - and that includes the duplicates for the pages I scanned in greyscale and/or colour as well as lineart. ftp.rodents.montreal.qc.ca:/mouse/misc/EK-KA630-UG-001/ in case you're curious. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

From: "der Mouse" <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 4:08 PM For me it is simply a matter of what is most popular. There is another format I would prefer to use but it doesn't have enough acceptance. It is my wish that the documents last, the only way to do that is to use PDF's. A few of the documents I've created are over 10MB but post enough and use have many giga-bytes. Randy www.s100-manuals.com

From: "Jim Leonard" <trixter at oldskool.org> Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 3:00 PM with a format -- it it. person http://www.oldskool.org/ http://www.mobygames.com/ http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ Being a person to blame all of the PDF's I create are sloppy. I scan a document and I post it. It is my hope that other who have or want to take the time will clean them up and maybe OCR. If anyone creates an improved copy I will replace mine with it (so far no takers). I do not care is there are extra dots, lines left by paper edges, punch holes showing, pages slightly out of alignment, etc. If it bothers anyone they are welcome to fix it to their liking and if they wish return it to me. My desire is to create a useful document that other can use, I believe that sooner or later coputer technology will bring about an OCR program that will work right and they will be cleaned up then. I have gotten documents that I did want the text and have OCR'ed and proof read. It can take days to do it right, it only takes a fraction of the time to create a PDF that is "good nuff". To lookup jumper settings I don't care if I can see a line that is the edge of the paper. Randy www.s100-manuals.com

Who can you possibly know what he wants to do with this file? While it may be true that this is 'not the point of PDF', the very fact that he needs to do it suggests that pdf is not the right file format to use for distributing such collections of images. But if that's the format that's used, you have to find some way to hack it. -tony

Did you not see where I said "scriptable"? "Print to file" from a GUI interface (like xpdf) doesn't count. You also appear to have missed the part where I want to *extract* the image, not convert it to yet another wrapper format (such as PostScript). There *is* pdfimages, but that's not what you appeared to be talking about. (I also don't actually know whether it works, though I would tend to assume it does - vide infra.) ...from PDF to PostScript, which is not what I wanted. You clearly have never tried to do anything useful with the PostScript resulting from pdf2ps; it is not suitable for doing anything with at finer than page granualrity. I don't know what kind of stuff xpdf generates; I haven't yet got around to building any of that. (I was made aware of it only recently, and even more recently did I get hints on how to build it without all the GUI goop.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

der> Does Acrobat run under any of the open-source ones? Is Acrobat der> itself free (at least as-in-beer)? Yes, and yes. Adobe recently released an update of Acrobat for Linux (for a long time they hadn't gone beyond V5; recently they released V7 which I believe is the current version). I've used both on my Linux (Fedora 1) system. Both work, though V7 is clearly better. That includes some things I run into at work that other viewers don't handle -- such as password-protected files. paul

Jules Richardson wrote: V7 has the nifty ability for document authors to cause the document to "phone home" when its opened. <end sarcasm> http://lwn.net/Articles/129729/

Paul Koning wrote: The big prob I've found with the Linux port of v7 is that you can't print multiple copies. I think it's one of Adobe's little nudges to buy the full version. Which of course doesn't exist.... Doc

der Mouse wrote: See, now you're just trolling, because you run BSD (free, no license needed, has severl PDF readers to choose from). -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005 00:28:31 -0400 (EDT) der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote: I bought a few skid of Dell Optiplexes at auction about this time last year. I got approx. 80 machines for $40. I've sold 30 or so of them for from $20 to $80 each on eBay. All of the above machines are very capable of running NetBSD. There is a useful NetBSD package in the pkgsrc collection called xpdf that will read and (somewhat) manipulate PDF files. It is trivial to print from xpdf to any common postscript printer, or to almost any non-postscript printer with a printer filter script that uses ghostscript. I got an Apple Laserwriter that speaks Postscript about two years ago at auction, on a skid that also included other stuff, (including a Powerbook hidden in the bottom of one of the cartons that I sold for $80 on eBay), for $5.00. Monitors you can get for almost free. When I was buying that 'skid of Optiplexes' back a year ago, I avoided the skids that had monitors, as I have enough of them, they have almost no resale value unless bundled with a system and they're just a burden to dispose of. You can get a workable used monitor for under $5 easily at yard sales. Keyboards and mice are also 'virtually free.' I got handed a box of ten or so Dell keyboards at an auction by somebody who just wanted the SGI keyboard out of the box. I bought 'the remaining boxes' of Mice at an auction for $10, then all these people converged on me and bought individual mice out of the boxes for a buck each. I think I've demonstrated that it can cost you negative hundreds of dollars to get the software and hardware needed to view and print PDF documents. That's what I've spent on 'commodity' PeeCee hardware in the last several years. -Scott

At 08:19 PM 6/2/2005, Randy McLaughlin wrote: Apparently it's OK to spend $200 on a nice set of wrenches, but not OK to scrounge a contemporary PC to read contemporary documentation containers. - John

The difference being that the set of spanners doesn't need desk space to use it, doesn't need maintiaing [1]. and is likely to outlast me. [1] I have neither the skill nor the test gear to maintain a modern PC. -tony

Not with the hardware to run it on... -tony