[Edu-sig] Things to come

[Steve Morris]

"Dinu C. Gherman" writes:
 > PDF was never designed to be a collaborative editing format.

Exactly!
...
 > So, one can hardly blame PDF/PS for not being something 
 >it never pretended to be.

I guess I am not making myself clear. It is not a matter of blaming or
criticising pdf. I just don't think it is right for collaborative
projects. You don't seem to disagree in spite of your strenuous
rebuttal.

 > The comparison with executable binaries is closer to the 
 > truth, although it is not impossible at all to do something 
 > else but print a PDF on paper or watch it onscreen. In fact,
 > there is a whole "prepress" industry of companies providing 
 > PDF modification tools, AGFA being one of the bigger fish in 
 > the pool.

The comparison is even closer than you might think. I've dissasembled
and even decompiled binary executables. :-) As you know the process
isn't all that different from what PDF extraction and modification
tools do. I've written simple postscript text extractors myself (in
Postscript.) I originally mentioned this in my post but decided it
would distract from the point and edited it out. I'm too wordy as it
is.

> So, let's not make this a religious war without a good reason.

I'm not sure where you see a religious war happening. Do you disagree
that pdf is less accessable than say html or DocBook? Do you disagree
that that makes it less desirable as a collaboration language? Do you
disagree that these are significant concerns when deciding how to
publish in a collaborative project?  Right or wrong these are my
points and I fail to see how attempting to make these points
(apparently unsuccessfully) makes me irrationally religious on a
matter where simple facts should prevail.

I think postscript is a great language in its place. I often write
postscript code to create special purpose documents, documents that
others might create in a drawing package. I love the almost object
oriented graphics state with its gsave/grestore. A lot of good scull
sweat went into designing Postscript. A fair number of older
postscript (compatible :-) ) printers in the world have some of my
software in them. One of them even has an undocumented builtin word
that allowed me to more quickly calculate Mandelbrot images directly
on the printer (my own private Easter Egg.)  I think everything should
be written in a format that can translate to pdf when desirable. It is
just not a good sourcing language and that's what you need for
collaborative documents. If a document is released on only one format
it probably shouldn't be pdf.

Regards
Steve Morris