The merits of PDF (was Re: IPA Text-to-Speech)

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 21:12:11 -0400, Robert B Wilson <han_solo55@...>
wrote:

> i tried a free trial version of cool edit a while ago and found that it
> was a horribly crippled "toy" version of the real program...
> both that and my general dislike of adobe (mostly because of that
> horrible pdf format that seems to be so popular (there are people who
> still use dialup and don't want to wait 45 minutes for a half page
> document to download!) and the insanely high prices they charge for most
> of their products...) lead me to advise people not to use this product...
Well, there *used* to be a non-toy free version. I don't know what
happened to it.

As for the avoidance of Adobe, personally I'll go right along with you in
most cases, except PDF is so damn useful when you've got a special
character set, or some very precise layout, and you've no way of knowing
if your audience has anyway to reproduce exactly (or even vaguely) what
you intend if you stick to any other cross-platform format, like HTML.
Thankfully, Acrobat is not the only way to make PDFs, so you don't have to
line Adobe's coffers to take advantage of it.





Paul