Hans Conser wrote:

PDF is about the smallest way to compress high quality files.  Size depends on ratio of image to text in the file.  It has become the standard way to deliver stuff to your printer.  My friend who publishes a 35 page magazine creates it in Quark or Pagemaker and then distilles the whole magazine into one pdf file for the printer.

You can get acrobat all day long on ebay for far less than $250.

BTW, Mac OS X impements pdf in the system software, so you can save anything from any program as a pdf as I understand it, I don't run X.

Hans

If you mean high quality bit maps. I might agree. Nothing beats plain ASCII
text however. Fonts are miniature jpg's so to speak. Some are as small as
5 dots by 7 dots. 35 dots total. If you go to a fancy font that is
only 20 by 20 that is a total of 400 dots. Over ten times as many.
Computers move dots around more or less one at a time. It therefore
takes ten times as long to move fancy fonts around and ten times as much
storage. Icons are the same problem. Basically they too are miniature
jpg's. A 50 dot by 50 dot icon would be 2500 dots. Back in the old days
there was a chip called a character generator. You input only
one 7 bit ASCII character and out would come a 11 by 9 bit mapped
character in 10 micro seconds or so. For all practical purposes a speed
and storage multiplier of over 14. The Mac,  fonts, icons and Windows 
changed all that for the worst by forcing the processorto  plot each dot 
one dot at a time. No additional information. It was all cosmetics.

Monumental mistake IMHO and I think more would agree if they really 
understood what had happened. The productivity of the computer
world would be ten times what it is now if this had not happened.

Paul Lamar
 
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