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

Paul, PDF files are not like JPG files, PDF use vector mapping (like a CAD
program) for text not a bitmap like JPG. Try zooming way in on a PDF file
and you will see the characters stay perfectly formed. Same with TrueType
fonts. Zoom in on a JPG and it gets worse looking as the pixels magnify and
characters start looking like the bunch of blocks that they are.
WYSIWYG is not necessarily a waste of resources. I think it is worthwhile to
see exactly what the author intended. If we were using telegraph wires,
sure - Morse Code would be more efficient for exchanging data but with
today's modern networks and fast processors why not use all that power to
convey information with the richness and flavor the author intended. Even
though Morse Code is more efficient, wouldn't you rather have a phone call?
(I.E. what did he mean by that? I can't hear his tone of voice)

My 2 cents

Chuck Dunlap
Network Engineer

I know about it and agree with you but I did not want to get into those
details. It still requires many more bits or bytes to define one letter 
than a single 7 bit ASCII character however. You did a very good job of 
explaining that.

I have absolutely nothing against it for desk top publishing but
to use it for all forms of communications such as email is a gross
waste of the worlds internet bandwidth.

Paul Lamar
 
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