- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charlesn@sunrise.srl.rmit.edu.au>
- Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 14:41:27 +1000 (EST)
- To: "w3c-wai-ig@w3.org" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
WL suggested that webmasters could just tell people to give them the electronic version which was used to produce the paper version. Which is usually true, although not always. One such case I recently ran into was a chinese document, which had been typeset and printed using some arcane system that could not readily be translated, as far as I could discover, and the alternative offered by the commissioners, was a PDF document of scanned material. (They are not experts. Otherwise they wouldn't pay me to do the job I suppose) The solution that we used (lacking OCR software for chinese, japanese, korean, vietnamese, and a few other languages I have had to convert to HTML) was to retype the material from a paper version. But there seems to be a simpler solution. It is posible using most browsers to print a web page. It is even usually possible to print it without the headers that say where it came from. And using CSS2 it will be possible to provide a full print stylesheet (@media print { print-style }) to ensure that it comes out looking beautiful. This is the value of PDF - it enables printed material to be reliably transferred electronically, then printed at the receiving end. For this one purpose it is an excellent medium, and cheaper for most people than using RTF, as well as (I believe) less capable of being used to transmit viruses. It is not a good substitute for HTML (in my humble opinion), and does not seem likely to become one. my 2c worth (Actually in Australia 2c coins are no longer legal tender. I hope that doesn't reflect on the value of my thoughts...) Charles McCathieNevile
Received on Wednesday, 16 September 1998 01:05:30 UTC