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pdf is for hoarding, not for sharing. ;-)

In a recent praise of Charles' cammellanus info, Scott mentioned:

> pdf guarantees that a page on a site will be read as it was assembled. The
> government is keen on having their documents load just so. There are good
> reasons for saving documents to pdf. I just wish I didn't have to print them
> and then scan them to save them to disk or mailing list.
> 
> All the best!
> 
> Scott
> 

Company catalogs and data sheets have commercial, legal-obligation
properties that make it good that they can't be altered, easily, also.
Likewise, many professional publications need it. The newer versions of
Acrobat are infinitely better than the old ones, too, but still almost
demand wasting paper to make them really readable. [At least they finally
learned about scroll bars!]

I'm all for our dedicated volunteers using whatever posting method makes
their life easier, and I'll normally do what I have to to
read/print/scan/convert/etc. and make it usable to me.

That said, I would like to respectfully suggest that posting anything long
and pure text in anything but plain ASCII makes very little sense to a group
whose objectives are to "spread the word." If it really needs pretty
formatting, a common word-processing format, like .doc or even HTML is easy
to do and easy to use. PDF is actually more trouble to post, wastes
bandwidth and storage space, and is far less user friendly. [If you have the
right drivers and/or operating system, it is certainly a better printing
format.]

A roster in PDF format is, like for Scott, essentially useless to me. [I
don't have access to a scanner, right now, anyway.]

I hope this makes sense. I was an early opponent of using pdf on the web
site, but have backed off in recent months. I still think we need to use
some judgement as to which documents need to be cast in concrete (i.e., an
ancient MAC printing format) and thus made less generally useful.

Just my Sat. $0.02, because I have no water to change. :-)

Wright

-- 
Wright Huntley -- 650 843-1240 -- 866 Clara Dr. Palo Alto CA 94303 
                    http://www.sfbaka.net.

   Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote
   learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment
   prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as
   good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would
   have the smartest race of people on earth. -- Will Rogers

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