A quandry....

From: Jeffrey Sharp <jss_at_subatomix.com>
Date: Mon Oct 14 11:30:01 2002

On Friday, October 11, 2002, Sue & Francois wrote:
> AFAIK PDF and TIFF will be totally unusable with any one byte missing.

While that is probably true for certain bytes (e.g. metadata), I'm almost
sure that other bytes could be mangled with little effect in both PDF and
TIFF format. You might have a 'q' instead of an 'A' or a black pixel instead
of a white pixel. HTML isn't as invulnerable as you think. Screw up a key
'<' character and your document is dead.

For most manuals, with diagrams and pictures, I vote for PDF. If the
document is completely textual, ASCII text may be a better choice.

TIFF is horrible; many programs I've tried don't handle multi-page TIFFs.
Either they display only the first page (Photoshop) or just blow chunks and
die. I've found that Paint Shop Pro does it right. Acrobat 5 will also
convert multi-page TIFFs to PDF for you.

I would have known for sure if my employer hadn't gone under last month. My
next big project there was to get grokky with the PDF format. It's a
monster; the spec is several inches thick.

-- 
Jeffrey Sharp
Received on Mon Oct 14 2002 - 11:30:01 BST

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