Subject: Re: HOWTO

[Ben Steeves]

On Mon, 2004-04-12 at 16:47, Rudi Chiarito wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 03:28:37PM -0400, Will Backman wrote:
> > I would argue, though, that PDF is best for print and poor for screens. 
> 
> What do you mean, "poor for screens"? It has support for Powerpoint-like
> fades! [1] What more do you need? :]
> 
> Rudi
> [1] Ok, and screen-oriented features like hyperlinks, bookmarks and
> interactive forms, too.

PDF is layout-oriented.  It attempts to preserve the look and feel of
the document in question as "published" by the author.  Information is
often best utilized in a data-oriented standard, such as HTML[*].  With
an HTML document, you get hyperlinks, bookmarks (internal hyperlinking),
headers, lists, etc (all things you get in PDF), but the layout is
(optionally) up to the user.  Changing, for example, the font size and
column size of an HTML document is trivial, whereas changing those
variables on a PDF is next to impossible.  

[*] OK, HTML isn't the best example, since web designers use it to for
both document description and layout, but in it's "pure form" it makes a
usable document description language.  That's why I said "optionally"
above.


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