Re: Structured text v. page descriptions (was Netscape, HTML, and

lilley@v5.cgu.mcc.ac.uk (Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit) said/wrote:

>Other problems, speaking as someone who writes documents for a living:
>
>> create documents in a professional design
>> environment, send them through the Acrobat 2.0 Distiller ($1,599), and then
>> manually insert hyperlinks which in fact point to other Web resources
>
>I would rather my professional design environment actually put in the links
>rather than hacking them by hand. I have hacked into machine generated
>PostScript in the past to get it to do unusual things (like print ;-) ) and I
>do not want to be doing this on a regular basis to maintain documents. Suppose
>I make some small mistake in the original document and have so regenerate the
>PDF? Now I have to hack in all the URLs again. No thanks.


Just to clarify the process, the links are inserted "manually" from within
Acrobat Exchange. Not quite as neat as the Framemaker scenario below, but
you're not hacking through Postscript code either.


>An interesting alternative scenario is WebMaker, where you create FrameMaker
>documents and put the URLs into the original document. Much better.
>
>> Acrobat the
>> works with S-Mosaic if a user clicks on an Internetbased hyperlink within
>> the Acrobat document.
>
>>From this do I deduce that the pdf is displayed in a separate viewer which
>then comunicates in presumably a proprietary way with this particular browser
>to go get the referred-to documents? Not very nice, unless this can be
>extended to all browsers on all platforms.
>
>The original poster had a better idea, with pdf documents being displayed by
>the browser. That means the pdf spec has to be a lot more open, so that people
>can implement compliant browsers. Alternatively, they could be rendered
>externally and then displayed inside the existing browser, much the same way
>thet Chimera (I believe) does inline images.
>


Well, that is what I'd like (I was the original poster), but in the
interim, I'm willing to put up with Acrobat-as-helper-application (I know
it's not ideal).

I was originally just trying to add to the discussion by pointing out that
there might be other ways to expand the ways of doing designer kinds of
things on the Web without crippling HTML in the process.

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Mark Connolly
Connolly Design Inc., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
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Received on Friday, 28 October 1994 13:16:42 UTC