Re: Digital Whisper issue #1

On Sunday 04 Oct 2009 13:09:51 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > 1. Why are the articles in PDF format? PDF suffers from poor
> > accessibility, inconvenience, low ability to be hacked and re-used, and
> > other problems. I don't have a PDF viewer configured in my browser, and
> > when clicking on the link, one of them was downloaded to my hard-disk,
> > and I am too inconvenienced to open it using a PDF viewer.
> 
> I actually think that PDF is great. It is freely available, preserves
> formatting across OS / applications, and is contained in a single file
> ([X]HTML is not). 

The latter can be solved using solutions such as .zip or tar.gz or a CHM :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help

Also, you can always put the HTML you want under a certain path on the server 
and use mirroring tools. So it's a solved problem.

> Is is searchable and the text is extractable. 

It is not as searchable as HTML or XML is, and the text is not easily 
extractable if there is fancy formatting or layout. And not all FOSS PDF 
viewers have adequate mechanisms for it. 

> Is is
> also accessible to the disabled, though Linux support for that feature
> may be missing (a problem with Linux applications, not with PDF
> itself). 

It's much less accessible to the disabled than XHTML is.

> There are RTL issues with PDF though.
> 

Big RTL issues.

Nevertheless, by using DocBook/XML and other tools one can easily generate 
both XHTML and PDF output. And you can convert XHTML to PDF too using the 
print-to-file function of the browsers.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> >> If anyone is willing to contribute, submit an article or give a
> >> feedback, contact Digital Whisper crew here -
> >> [email protected]
> 
> When I get around to it!
> 

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Parody on "The Fountainhead" - http://shlom.in/towtf

Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice.


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