[Coco] Re: why you should stick with pdf

[John W. Linville]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 12:06:24AM -0400, John E. Malmberg wrote:

> I do not know that the specification published by Adobe to the public is 
> current and with out errors.
> 
> PDF is only fully portable for platforms that Adobe has released 
> supported viewers for.

All of your arguments against pdf apply equally to the (even more)
proprietary djvu.

> So if you generate the PDF document with an open source tool, then it is 
> likely that it can be viewed everywhere.  But at the same time, it will 
> not be using the latest or even all of the features of PDF.

So, generate the pdf w/ open source tools and be done with it.
There is certainly no need to use cutting-edge technology to preserve
20-year-old magazines...

There certainly is support for indexes, hyperlinking, etc.
What critical functions are missing?

> The difference is that with DjVU, the source for the viewer can also be 
> put on the DVD so that what ever platform you have in the future can 
> build the reader if it can not use the existing binary.

And the same is true for a number of pdf viewers.  Plus, w/ pdf you
are fairly certain not to need to worry about such things as it will
likely be widely supported far into the future.

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at tuxdriver.com