RE: Bug reports . . . 17 of them . . . .

> From:	Paul Derbyshire [SMTP:pderbysh@usa.net]
> 
	Mainly about freeness of PDF and Postscript, but...

	Outlook Exploder is a piece of junk. Even for Microsoft software.
It's their
	worst IMO. Junk it and get Pegasus or Eudora.

	I was the last one off Pegasus here, but the system manager
	wants to use Exchange for reasons to do with other packages
	(which we might re-sell).

> >       Generally HTML is not a layout control language
> >	(use PDF of postscript for that)
> 
> Not everyone can. Only HTML has *free* editors. PDF, Postscript, Tex
> (which
> 
	When Postscript was introduced, people hand coded it; you
	shouldn't judge it by the bloated Postscript generated by
	the Microsoft print drivers.

	Many free tools can generate Postscript (e.g. groff, xfig,
	html2ps and even amaya).  ghostscript can convert postscript
	to PDF (including Distiller markup) although the GPLed version
	(5.10) doesn't compress images.  (Using HTML to create PDF is
	meaningful, because the PDF fixes the layout that the designer
	sees; most commercial page designers don't want the browser
	or user style sheet to change the page appearance.)

	Note that the HTML 4 PDF version was created using html2ps,
	although they used Distiller to create the PDF.  The WAI
	guidelines were done with all free tools for the PDF conversion,
	although, unfortunately they used a rather old version of
	ghostscript, which didn't include the hyperlinks.


> Why there is a lack of (free) Tex editors is beyond me... it's an open
> 
	TeX is not WYSIWYG, so you use ordinary text editors to
	edit it.

> document standard, freely implementable, unlike, say, PDF.
> 
	PDF is, if anything, more open than TeX.  TeX is bookware,
	whereas the PDF specification is available for free download
	(and like Postscript is very well documented).  TeX, of 
	course, is open source, whereas you need to go to ghostscript
	for an open source PDF processor.  (bookware means the software
	is free, but you have to buy the book if you want user 
	documentation.)

	Both Postscript and PDF permit third party implementation.

Received on Monday, 14 June 1999 07:37:49 UTC