Disk Drive Documents - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

7 Jun 1999

I'll pass on PDF email, thank you very much.

I know it's of limited interest to many of the die-hard retrocomputing
persons in this interest group, but for your info, if you're interested, the
version of the Arcobat Viewer (Acrord32.EXE) which I'm using nearly every
day is a nearly totally reflex-operable program which allows me to view,
scale, SEARCH, print single-sided, or, with a freebie plug-in, print duplex,
which is double-sided in two passes, in full living color . . . the
important feature for this discussion being SEARCH.   If this were just a
bitmap imbedded in a framework of some sort, you wouldn't be able to search
for text would you?  How do you suppose, in light of what you know, this is
done?

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner &lt;spc(a)armigeron.com&gt;
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
&lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt;
Date: Monday, June 07, 1999 9:23 PM
Subject: Re: Disk Drive Documents

...
 It was thus said that the Great Richard Erlacher once
stated:

 Well? . . . now you see why we disagree.  This doesn't just extend to you
 and to me, but rather to lots of other people who use documentation
 differently. 
  Five months ago we had a similar discussion, this time about what formats
to use when emailing people (started because of complaints about messages in
...
 HTML which were annoying several people on this list,
myself included).
Part of the problem, as you state, is that different people have different
needs from documentation, and there are two aspects to documentation (or any
...
 ``printed'' material in general):  content and
presentation, or as Marshall
McLuhan would say, ``message and media.''  Both are important (``the medium
is the message'' anyone?) but for this crowd, it seems that the message
tends to be more important than the medium.

  As an experiement, I downloaded a PDF file (for the record, I have a PDF
viewer for Linux).  Can't save the document as text, but I could print it to
...
 a file.  So I did that.  Ended up with PostScript. 
Took a look at the
postscript and discovered that what I ended up with was basically a large
bitmap embedded in PostScript.  Sure, I also have GhostView, but the output
looks like an okay scan of a rather mediocre photocopy.  Nice.

  To be fair, the PDF in question appears to be just that though---an image
encapsulated in PDF.  I tried finding a word that I know exists in the
document but oddly enough, the computer couldn't find it.

> . . . and you'll have to do more than shout to convince me that's
(meaning
...
 > the fact every page is a document apart from the
one major unit to which it
...
 > belongs) not a big part of why the LINUX doc's
are so impenetrably muddled.
...

  Linux's docs are so impenetrably muddled because programmers in general
don't like writing documentation (``The source is the documentation,'' is
too often the excused used).  Heck, there are problems with comments IN THE
SOURCE CODE not being updated, so expecting any external documentation to be
...
 up to date is asking a bit much (not that I like this
any).

  -spc (So Richard, want me to start replying to you in PDF format?)