Re: Boreanesian in the Web (was: Why Triggers?)

En réponse à Dungeonmaster <dungeonmaster@...>:

>
> No, you do not :-)
> PDF is hyper-text sensitive.
>
Can you call for a point in another PDF-file this way? I'm far from sure. If
you want it to work, you need to make the whole page into one PDF-file, and PDF-
files are well-known to be very memory consuming (normal, seen that they are
really complex electronic photocopies).

> > The whole point of Internet is that you can navigate easily. If you
> > have to download a PDF file each time you move from one chapter to
> > another, it's gonna be awful.
>
> Not really. On Windows systems, Acrobat Reader loads inside your
> browser. So
> you can page through PDF documents almost as if they were HTML
> pages.
Taking approximately 10 times as much time to download than a HTML file of
corresponding size. Moreover, it usually doesn't cache all the file, but gets
only the page you're watching, making navigation extremely slow and difficult.
When I really want to see a PDF-file, I download it and then print it, it's
much faster.

PDF
> lacks things like sound and moving images (afaik, but I have been
> proven
> wrong before), but for text documentation (especially unicode) it is
> tyhe
> best method there is, imho.
>
True for text documentation, but not for browser navigation. Unless you have a
really fast computer (and even then, the one I'm using is quite a powerful
Pentium III computer, and still loading PDF-files through the browser is
painfully slow. I'm in the process of buying a Pentium IV 1.6GHz computer, with
512Mo RAM. I'll see with this one how fast it gets), it's quite unfriendly.

>
> > No, I think you should take the time to learn HTML (it took me one
> hour to
> > learn enough HTML to begin making my webpage, so you see how easy
> > it is). As for transcription, remember that HTML allows also
> subscripts
> > and superscripts. It can help a lot.
>
> One more advantage of PDF files: Unlike HTML they do not call on local
> fonts, but include there own. This allows the use of proper Unicode and
> even
> fantasy fonts. I have created fonts of the scripts of two of my
> conlangs,
> and can produce nice PDF documents in them.
>
You can also use Dynamic Fonts for that, Nizar Habash (I hope I spelled the
name right) has a very nice site with them, which loads very fast:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~habash/delason/

I don't know what the material is needed for production of Dynamic Fonts, but
for what I remember, it's cheaper than Acrobat.

Of course, you need a browser that supports Dynamic Fonts. I just hope it's not
only the case of Internet Explorer and Netscape.

>
> I believe PDF files are user-friendly enough, off course in combination
> with
> HTML files. I should make a small HTML site, indexing everything etc,
> but
> present the actual data in PDF files. The conversion from MS Word is
> also
> very simple and looks 200x better than from Word to HTML.
>
True. Still, waiting for two minutes to get a single page downloaded is not
what I call "user-friendly". And I had to go through such things when I try to
read PDF-files through the browser.

> But most of all: PDF enables you to use Unicode (e.g. IPA extensions)
> without worrying about whether the recipient has the proper fonts
> installed.
>
So do Dynamic Fonts, with a faster result. Both methods have advantages and
drawbacks. Stick to simple HTML stays the best solution in my opinion.

> Maarten van Beek
> (The Netherlands)
>
Christophe (the Netherlands too, though I'm French :) . Do you liver near Den
Haag? That's where I live).

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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