[OT] Purpose of pdf files?

  • Thread starter Thread starter miskairal
  • Start date Start date
Html, mht, zip, doc, gif, jpg, flash, rtf, and, of course, text files,
which should be used for all text when there is no need for images and
formatting.
Click to expand...
Pdf has the great advantage that you can't alter the document when
viewing it. I get constantly frustrated with, e.g., doc files which
don't close without asking me whether I want to save changes if I have
so much as inadvertently touched the space bar while viewing the file.
 
thoss said:
Pdf has the great advantage that you can't alter the document when
viewing it. I get constantly frustrated with, e.g., doc files which
don't close without asking me whether I want to save changes if I have
so much as inadvertently touched the space bar while viewing the file.
Click to expand...

You do know that you can tap the letter N or n rather than mousing to the reply?
 
miskairal said:
I hate pdf files. I find them difficult to view but that's just me. I am
finding more and more people sending me photos in a pdf file "to make
them smaller". I always thought that pdf files were used so that they
could be read on any computer. Are they meant to make a file or many
files smaller?
Click to expand...
PDF Files Can be a good thing, or a really bad thing. The good thing is
that the pdf reader from Adobe is free and works great. The bad thing
is that there is, in my opinion, no good freeware reader. All the
freeware readers besides Adobe's suck dirty bath water.

In my business, pdf files are a staple. They make maps much smaller in
size and they are easy for beginners to use as attachments.

If you let me know just what your problem is, manybe I can help.
 
accooper said:
PDF Files Can be a good thing, or a really bad thing. The good thing is
that the pdf reader from Adobe is free and works great.
Click to expand...
And is a huge download.
The bad thing
is that there is, in my opinion, no good freeware reader. All the
freeware readers besides Adobe's suck dirty bath water.
Click to expand...
Are you looking for a fight here or something? Methinks you are trying
to keep this thread alive as you know you will have many on your case
for this statement.
In my business, pdf files are a staple. They make maps much smaller in
size and they are easy for beginners to use as attachments.
Click to expand...
They shouldn't be being taught to use pdf to resize. Give your employess
some credit for brains and teach them how to resize graphics properly so
that if they want to send one picture to someone they don't need to get
out the pdf software to do so.
If you let me know just what your problem is, manybe I can help.
Click to expand...
I do not like the way that when viewing a pdf file you start to scroll
down to read or see more and suddenly you are on the next page without
having finished the first. I also do not like the way that people using
pdf format think that it is then acceptable to send huge files "because
I pdf'ed it". I am stuck with dialup unless I want to pay out big for
satellite. ISDN is not an option because then you have no phone when the
power is out and our nearest neighbour is over a kilometre away and
mobile phones don't work here either.
 
I do not like the way that when viewing a pdf file you start to scroll
down to read or see more and suddenly you are on the next page without
having finished the first.
Click to expand...

That is configurable.
 
miskairal said:
I do not like the way that when viewing a pdf file you start to scroll
down to read or see more and suddenly you are on the next page without
having finished the first.
Click to expand...

Under preferences -> Page Display, I've set it to "Single" page, and
avoid that.

--
Patrick Heffernan
Latitude: 28.14 S
Longitude: 152.04 E

.... 90% of the time I'm right, so why worry about the other 3%?
 
Roger said:
You mean ...for sharing of the arranged visual display of documents..
Click to expand...

Archiving and sharing of documents that you don't want edited. Yes.

If you are interested in achiving a certain visual display of a visual
arrangement of text and images for printing. If you want to archive the
actual content then pdf files are definitely not good, as you will have
big problems unpacking and accessing the content. PDF files are not
supposed to be unpacked. It is not a storage format, it is a visual
display format.
Click to expand...

You are confused by what I mean by "archiving." I never claimed that
it was so you could go back and edit and change. I know PDFs are a
one-way-street. But they are currently the only one-way-street that
has been consistent for years. I have stuff written in earlier version
os MS Word that do not render the same on the current version.
If you want to take your family with you to another place you should
use a car or an aeroplane and put the actual family members in that
transport container.
If you only take a photo of your family with you it might not be
possible to restore the actual people from the photo when you arrive at
the new place.
Click to expand...

When I want my mother-in-law 2,000 miles away (just far enough) to see
how cute my daughter looks dressed as Amelia Earhart I don't put her on
a plane and send her... I send a picture. The right tool for the job.
Yes, I know, taking a photo is very convenient, but it doesn't work for
storing or transporting the actual content. A photo is just a visual
display of the family.
Click to expand...

And that's the exact purpose of a PDF (which was the OP's question).
PDF files are not good for archiving any kind of content, it is a way
to display a certain arrangement. Like if you take images and texts
and lay them out on a table in a certain arrangement and take a photo
of that arrangement, that photo can be printed out, or save to be
viewed again, but you cannot get the original images and text back from
a photo. Not without a lot of extra work and the help of special
software anyway. PDF files are like such photos of visually arranged
stuff.
Click to expand...

Again, you are confused by my use of the word "archiving."
So you have a habit of choosing the most unsuitable file formats for
storing information.
Click to expand...

Yes, I should have knows not to trust a little company to be in
business years later, or to be loadable on a new version of Windows, or
to have the same fonts and printer and printer ports available. The
PDF format is (for better or worse, it's not MY favorite either) firmly
established now. Even if Adobe vanishes, there are plenty of other
creation and viewing apps.

And what format SHOULD I have saved the wedding annoucement in? These
were the days when Windows still didn't really work. There AMI was the
only word processor that even tried to do WYSIWYG editing. The only
other DTP program for the home user was by Publish-IT! (another company
that's gone).

We will hear from you again. When you try to unpack the pdf files you
have created, so you can get back the original data. We will tell you
that it is maybe not even possible and ask you why you chose to save
the visual display of an arrangement of the data instead of storing the
data in some suitable file format for storing and transporting data,
like zip files, or mht files.
Click to expand...

No you won't. I know that the best I'll get back from a PDF is raw
text (if it's not too close to a graphic object) and a medium-res
"print." You'll be happy to know that I already take your suggestion
and have source documents available in ZIP files; they are safely
stored on single-sided low-density Atari 800 5.25" disks. I think they
were written in a program called SuperScript (but I can't be sure after
25 years). It's nice to know I have those instead of some
machine-independant display format. I do have some files that I moved
to my PC with a nul-modem cable. But all of the word processing
programs I've tried seem to have a little problem with the files. All
they show is a mess of extended characters. Go figure.
 
And if not PDF, what format do you suggest that can be read on almost any
computer and look the same on almost any computer?

Cheers, Allan
Click to expand...

There were alternatives when companies were trying to establish a
standard. After Adobe won easily, I was surprised that none of the
losers gave their tools away for free. Remember, it has only been
recently that people could generate .pdf's relatively easily for free.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_document_format#History

http://www.anycount.com/wordcounting_software/word_count/about_adobe_acrobat.htm

Apparently, the competitors were not impressive as I do not even
remember anybody ever using, yet alone praising formats such as Envoy
or Common Ground.
 
Eric said:
Archiving and sharing of documents that you don't want edited. Yes.



You are confused by what I mean by "archiving." I never claimed that
it was so you could go back and edit and change. I know PDFs are a
one-way-street. But they are currently the only one-way-street that
has been consistent for years. I have stuff written in earlier
version os MS Word that do not render the same on the current version.


When I want my mother-in-law 2,000 miles away (just far enough) to see
how cute my daughter looks dressed as Amelia Earhart I don't put her
on a plane and send her... I send a picture. The right tool for the
job.


And that's the exact purpose of a PDF (which was the OP's question).


Again, you are confused by my use of the word "archiving."


Yes, I should have knows not to trust a little company to be in
business years later, or to be loadable on a new version of Windows,
or to have the same fonts and printer and printer ports available.
The PDF format is (for better or worse, it's not MY favorite either)
firmly established now. Even if Adobe vanishes, there are plenty of
other creation and viewing apps.

And what format SHOULD I have saved the wedding annoucement in? These
were the days when Windows still didn't really work. There AMI was
the only word processor that even tried to do WYSIWYG editing. The
only other DTP program for the home user was by Publish-IT! (another
company that's gone).



No you won't. I know that the best I'll get back from a PDF is raw
text (if it's not too close to a graphic object) and a medium-res
"print." You'll be happy to know that I already take your suggestion
and have source documents available in ZIP files; they are safely
stored on single-sided low-density Atari 800 5.25" disks. I think
they were written in a program called SuperScript (but I can't be
sure after 25 years). It's nice to know I have those instead of some
machine-independant display format. I do have some files that I moved
to my PC with a nul-modem cable. But all of the word processing
programs I've tried seem to have a little problem with the files. All
they show is a mess of extended characters. Go figure.
Click to expand...

Have you tried the old Windows paint program? Maybe it will read them
and you can save them with a different extension so that other programs
can read them? JPEG is preferable, at least for my purposes.

Helen
 
Have you tried the old Windows paint program? Maybe it will read them
and you can save them with a different extension so that other programs
can read them?
Click to expand...

Superscript in Paint? That's like a modern scholar being fluent in
Upper Mammoth-Hunter. SS was totally dead long before Paint was a
usable program. An old Atari 800 and a Polaroid camera might do the
job.
 
Al said:
Superscript in Paint? That's like a modern scholar being fluent in
Upper Mammoth-Hunter. SS was totally dead long before Paint was a
usable program. An old Atari 800 and a Polaroid camera might do the
job.
Click to expand...

And there you go. Roger said that I would be better off to keep the
original files of anything.

Hardware and software can change radically over time. These word
processing files are useless to me now (not that they are any great
loss). But I do have a couple of the documents printed out on paper so
I can still refer to them and that works for me.

PDF files are like that. I wouldn't use them to try and save something
that I _had_ to be able to edit later. They are a snap-shot in time
that protects you from some of the archival uncertainty. And that is
what some people need.
 
PDF files are like that. I wouldn't use them to try and save something
that I _had_ to be able to edit later. They are a snap-shot in time
that protects you from some of the archival uncertainty. And that is
what some people need.
Click to expand...

I guess that works.

I look at it this way - if it comes on a pdf, I can read it. If I
have to put a nice looking dynamic (created at the time the user asks
for it) report on a web page I put it into a pdf file and send it to
the user. His browser runs his pdf plugin and shows it to him the way
I created it.

Otherwise, I have no particular use of the format, unless one of my
customers starts sending me reports in pdf and I have to figure out a
way to screen-scrape them.
 
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