Disk Drive Documents

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Mon Jun 7 23:18:38 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 <spc_at_armigeron.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
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?)
>
Received on Mon Jun 07 1999 - 23:18:38 BST