Re: Boreanesian in the Web (was: Why Triggers?)
| From: | Dungeonmaster <dungeonmaster@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, October 24, 2001, 15:36 |
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> > Come to think of it, the safest conversion that I know of is PDF. The
> > Acrobat Reader is free for download and once installed can be used
> > together with a browser.
>
> True, but then you cannot do hypertext, links and the like, IIRC.
No, you do not :-)
PDF is hyper-text sensitive.
> 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.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.
I use PDF for almost all my publications (as I have finally managed to get a
hold of Adobe Acrobat).
> 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.
> OK. But still think of it. PDF is not a very user-friendly format
> for Internet surfing. PDF files optionally accessible for people who
> want a complete version of the grammar to print down is a very good idea.
> Having only PDF files is not nice in my opinion.
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.
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.
Maarten van Beek
(The Netherlands)
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