Re: [TCLUG:14011] [rant] pdf on the web

["Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom" <carls@agritech.com>]

>Me, I like 'em. PDF is an open spec and is a great way to pass around
>printables. xpdf and Ghostview work goodly, and are free.
        for *printable* stuff it's fine and dandy. but it's a piss-poor
replacement for HTML, for reasons I outlined before.
        personally, I think it's used because people are lazy and don't want
to HTML-ize a document (and make it look good); but don't want to appear
lazy, by just scanning a page to a .jpg image. (it wouldn't be any larger
bytewise!)
        but I could be wrong.

>Yes, it's paper-y to lay things out as pages, but that's what it's for.
>It's a good choice for things like the product documentation you were
>trying to read.
        I disagree. the documentation was difficult to read anyway; not just
because of the wasted space on the sides of the page; nor because half the
page was cut off at the top or bottom of the window (at a readable
resolution); but because the text looked like *crap*! it was too small and
blurred to read at 100% size; and too pixelated and (still!) blurred at 125%!

I'd *fire* a webmaster who put that kind of crap on a company web site.
look at www.3ware.com yourself; or
http://www.3ware.com/products/ntservers.shtml, which is the page linking
their .pdf docs.

sorry. bad engineering really pisses me off...

Carl Soderstrom
System Administrator    307 Brighton Ave. 
Minnesota DHIA	        Buffalo, MN	
carls@agritech.com      (612) 682-1091