Cousin Stanley asked:
I've seen the statements before that mention
that PDF is good for layout and printing ....=20
Layout using CSS in HTML is fairly simple,
although something that has to be learned,
but unless Acrobat provides some sort of
super-easy WYSIWYG mode for layout,
it seems to me that anything I've seen
layout-wise in PDF could also be done
in CSS/HTML ....=20
Acrobat affords one the ability to convert from any PostScript representation
into .pdf --- there are also a number of other tools which will make .pdfs
which have far more capabilities. pdfTeX is an especially good example, see Han
The Thanh's doctoral thesis on its typesetting capabilities (available from
www.tug.org/tugboat).
I've a couple of things in my on-line portfolio which show some of the
possibilities of what can be done w/ .pdf.
http://members.aol.com/willadams
One can also see a number of interesting .pdfs at
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase
(I've a couple of things in there)
Pretty much the only alternatives for this are Flash or SVG. There aren't any
freeware tools for the former, and the latter is still nascent, w/ few
authoring tools and even fewer viewers. I just tried one of the former and it
crashed w/ even the simplest of objects from FreeHand (as well as from
FutureWave SmartSketch and Creaturehouse Expression).
I don't understand the supposed printing advantages
of PDF at all ....=20
Does the PDF format include extra special embedded=20
print directives that say make this rendering more beautiful=20
or do something print-wise that you wouldn't normally do
when printing a lowly HTML file ????
I've yet to see a way to represent a spot colour in HTML. Embedding fonts
robustly is another advantage of .pdfs, as is the ability to be certain of
pagination and scaling --- there are even printers which will directly accept a
..pdf copied to them for printing.
William
Christopher Jahn