[Edu-sig] Things to come

[Kirby Urner]

>Hmmm... I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume that this
>comment was general and not a characterization of people who dislike
>pdf file format; even though the juxtaposition made me a little queasy

That's correct.  "People who dislike the pdf file format" 
is not a category I've ever done any thinking with.

A PDF has a lot in common with an everyday book you find in
the library or in a book store.  Unless you electronify 
these in some way, they're basically "graphics" in the 
sense you mean, and therefore "stripped of intellectual 
content" (again in the sense you mean -- sounds a bit 
strange, applied to Plato or Shakespeare).  

Of course you can photocopy books -- but you can print 
and photocopy PDFs too (this is how the LiveWires stuff 
was intended to be used -- has handouts in classrooms 
(and what I've been saying here on edu-sig is I'm 
personally more interested in good ideas than such 
camera ready content)).

Certainly it's very easy to find good ideas in books, 
and reuse them, usually with some citation back to your 
source (not necessarily "the" source).  When a community 
shares books and papers in this way to advance knowledge, 
I still call that "collaboration," even if there's not 
a lot of direct cutting and pasting per se.

Note that the GNU license agreement, and many other copyleft 
schemes, aren't blanket "do any thing you want with this" 
agreements -- otherwise why have a "license" of any kind?  
In most of these schemes, you're agreeing to leave public 
what started public, and to making your modifications public 
as well (and I'm not "against" any of this -- these are 
fine conventions with a lot of good thinking behind them).

Also, I don't think a PDF is really quite as "graphical" 
as you portray in most cases.  You can easily search 
them by character string (once you've pulled them into
a reader -- true, a web crawler won't do this), and cut 
and paste paragraphs from them (e.g. into Word).  In a 
lot of ways, what they're good for is providing more 
control over appearance than HTML easily allows.  I've 
you've gone to all the trouble to use Adobe PageMaker 
for something, and you want to share that with others, 
a PDF is often the way to go (I'm doing this today in 
fact -- complicated registration forms with grids 
that would be extremely difficult to do in HTML -- 
except as embedded GIFs).

Kirby