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

> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: Constructed Languages List
> [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU]Namens Christophe Grandsire
> Verzonden: donderdag 25 oktober 2001 8:49
> Aan: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Onderwerp: 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.
I am not sure about that either. I know you can link to a location elsewhere
within the same document, and you can link to another document (PDF or
HTML), but I am not sure whether you can use external anchors.

> 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).
Well, I never said to make an entire page completely from PDF.Your framework
should be HTML (homepage, menus, indexes etc), but you could make a PDF
document for each language and link to it.

> > > 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.
You mean: of corresponding content. As I said in a reply to someone else:
you almost always must trade size for quality. As HTML pages are hardly more
than ASCII documents, they are usually quite small. But if you want to
include images etc, I don't think a PDF file is much larger than a HTML site
with its linked files, especially not when it includes many image files.

I have a PDF file without images, 45 pages, no larger than 120 kB. As I have
a quite fast connection, it downloads in 2 to 3 seconds.

> Moreover, it usually doesn't cache all the
> file, but gets only the page you're watching, making navigation
> extremely slow and difficult.
I have never had this happen. My computer always downloads the entire file,
then displays it.

> When I really want to see a PDF-file, I download it and then
> print it, it's much faster.
I don't want to print eveything I read...

> 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.
Never found that to be a problem. I think when viewing PDF files online it
is more the speed of your internet connection than your CPU speed that
determines the loading time. I have a 1 GHz, 384 Mb PC, with an
ADSL-connection and only with extremely big files (NetBooks of several
hundred pages), do I have an appreciable waiting time.

> > 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/
Heard about Dynamic Fonts, never really looked into it. I have to check that
out.

> I don't know what the material is needed for production of
> Dynamic Fonts, but for what I remember, it's cheaper than Acrobat.
Yes, the price of Adobe Acrobat is certainly a problem. I am glad I could
get my hands on a (legal!) copy for free.

> 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 simply don't know. I just know that since I write most of my stuff in Word
anyway (since it is not primarily meant for internet publication), the
easiest way to put it online is as a PDF file. This also ensures that things
come to look exactly as I want them.

> 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.
Two minutes for a single page or a single file??? Although even the latter
seems pretty absurd to me, unless you have a 28k8 modem or you are trying to
download the complete and illustrated works of Shakespeare in PDF (well, ok,
that would take more than 2 minutes I guess).

My site contains PDF files for a big set of NetBooks for a roleplaying game.
Most of these files are about 1 MB (some smaller, one as big as 6.8 MB), but
they contain 100s of pages of text each and small illustrations as well.

> > 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.
I think combining both would be best. A site based on HTML with detailed
information on languages etc in PDF files.

Maarten van Beek

Krimpen aan den IJssel (near Rotterdam)
The Netherlands

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