Many things

From: Scott Stevens <chenmel_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Sun Jan 30 12:41:55 2005

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 18:48:42 -0800 (PST)
Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 29 Jan 2005, Jules Richardson wrote:
>
> > Actually the problem with Ghostscript is that it's slow as hell
> > compared to Acrobat under Linux, at least the versions I've seen :-(
> >
> > Forget about xpdf too - several seconds for each page render on a
> > modern PC compared to instant for Acrobat.
>
> Wow. My 500MHz laptop renders postscript just fine. There's a
> "noticable" render time (eg. it's not instantaneous) but it's
> hardly an impediment to reading.
>
> (I've got a Sony VX89, 512M RAM, 500/900MHz CPU (acpi) nice screen
> etc, I put up with it for its 6 - 9 hr battery life.)
>
> freeBSD now, SuSE linux then. Haven't tried a DOS/Win port of it
> in a long time though.
>
> > Oh how I hate PDF :-(
>
> It's still useful, but it's being perverted as a "read only"
> no-fair-use medium for DRM purposes, on Windows anyways. It's
> misused a lot too.
>
>
I paid good money (> $300) for a licensed copy of the full Acrobat for
Windows a number of years back, specifically to be able to archive
vintage manuals, magazines, and docs to the PDF format. Which I
presumed at the time to be open, and to stay open. At least my
expensive licensed copy of Acrobat is of an early enough version that
it'll presumably always produce PDF files that are readable on the new
readers.

It's probably time to freeze the PDF format and refuse to let in DRM
hooks and whizz-woo features. Isn't the file format documented enough
that the format is 'freed' of Adobe's menace?

> Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
>
Received on Sun Jan 30 2005 - 12:41:55 GMT