From keith.bierman@eng.sun.com Tue May 23 20:12:28 2000 Received: from mercury.Sun.COM (mercury.Sun.COM [192.9.25.1]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id UAA64898 for ; Tue, 23 May 2000 20:12:27 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from keith.bierman@eng.sun.com) Received: from engmail2.Eng.Sun.COM ([129.146.1.25]) by mercury.Sun.COM (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA27367; Tue, 23 May 2000 11:12:18 -0700 (PDT) Received: from redherring.Eng.Sun.COM (redherring.Eng.Sun.COM [152.70.40.20]) by engmail2.Eng.Sun.COM (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3/ENSMAIL,v1.7) with ESMTP id LAA22339; Tue, 23 May 2000 11:12:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: from eng.sun.com (heliopolis [152.70.1.39]) by redherring.Eng.Sun.COM (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.1) with ESMTP id LAA14085; Tue, 23 May 2000 11:12:15 -0700 (PDT) Sender: Keith.Bierman@eng.sun.com Message-ID: <392AC9FF.C424BBA6@eng.sun.com> Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 11:12:16 -0700 From: "Keith Bierman (SunLabs)" Organization: Sun Microsystems Laboratories X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.7 sun4u) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Phillip Helbig CC: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.1809) Word or PDF for distributing WG5 documents References: <200005231759.TAA64849@dkuug.dk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Phillip Helbig wrote: > Van Snyder wrote: > > > Lawrie Schonfelder wrote: > > > > > Everyone can read pdf, the reader is freely available, but you need > > > relatively expensive prorietry software ... to create it. > > > > pdflatex is free. I would be very surprised if there is no Windows > > version of it. > > > Ahhh, but you're assuming everyone uses LaTeX. Personally, I think > Let's see if we can summarize: 1) PDF can be generated via gnu/freeware (e.g. ps2pdf, etc.) from anything that can generate postscript a) it can be generated "directly" by some packages (e.g. Frame, or nearly so with tex) b) can be generated from postscript via commerical sw (distiller). 2) PDF permits author choice of editing tool. Downside: propritary format, hard to edit (distiller allows some editing), requires authors to potentially make some effort (note that word users can purchase the full version of acrobat and then generating pdf is no harder than printing to any other printer ... I've done it myself). There are those who believe that Word itself is more common than pdf, and that between the viewers that are out there (PCviewer, various things from MS, etc.) that should be sufficient. Downside: 1) Word is not everywhere (although it's format is practically speaking available to anyone on the committee ;>) 2) Word can carry potentially harmful viri, due to interesting design choices. Clever use can mitigate. 3) Word can carry more information than the author intended, if the author isn't careful (another design choice). Outside of WG5 and J3 documents themselves (which I thought we had long ago settled) what precisely are we trying to change ... the minds of SC22 and/or ISO secretariat? If so, don't we need country positions, papers for Finland and etc.? If we aren't planning on changing our internal behavior, and if we aren't planning on trying to take formal action ... is there any particular reason why we have to have this pub debate via email??? :> > -- > Keith H. Bierman keith.bierman@Sun.COM| khb@chiba.Eng.Sun.COM > Sun Microsystems Laboratories | kbierman@acm.org > 901 San Antonio Road UMTV 29-234 | k.bierman@computer.org > Palo Alto, California 94303 | 650 336-2121 voice 650 336 0893 fax > Copyright 2000 >