manuals in pdf (resolution, compression)

From: der Mouse <mouse_at_Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
Date: Mon Jun 28 12:45:27 2004

> Since ghostview looks like a perfectly adequate PDF reader and is
> open source, what's the issue?

Personally? Because it has all of the disadvantages of PostScript (not
easily usable with plain-text tools, mostly) and more (usually the
whole thing is comparessed so it's not at all usable with plain-text
tools). Because (when the PDF is just a bunch of images, as with most
scanned manuals) it's often relatively difficult to extract individual
pages' images to do anything useful with them. Because it's annoying
to have to print it out in order to get something readable without
strain (at typical font sizes, characters are only ten or so pixels
high, and reading text at that size when the font has not been
bitmap-tuned for it, is a strain).

Now that I've been pointed at ps2ascii (which contrary to its name does
work on PDFs), some of the disadvantages of PDFs are alleviated - for
PDFs that contain text as opposed to image-per-page scans....

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Received on Mon Jun 28 2004 - 12:45:27 BST