Martin McCormick wrote:

>        What I would like to see is for MicroChip to have a robot that can
>spit out an ASCII text when requested, of any document that can be displayed
>this way.  That way, nobody would be out extra labor for something that would
>probably have limited appeal, and the robot would insure that new material
>could be had as soon as it was posted.

  I've seen this done.  Trust me, you won't like it.  Schematics get reduced
to an endless series of meaningless component descriptions and wire names.
Putting the body of the text back together is a pain.


>        I originally thought that the PDF's could be processed, but the
>encryption ruins even that possibility.  MChip should at least make it possible
>to download an unscrambled version of any freely available document.  That
>might be good enough.  The present situation just doesn't work for me and
>only marginally works for others for various reasons.

  The PDF interpreter is a smaller monkey on your system than would be the
postscript interpreter, but if PDF is not acceptable to you then postscript
is the next best thing.  It's just that postscript was the old standard that
PDF is replacing.  Postscript, by itself, isn't compressed and doesn't save
the fonts used in the document with the document.  PDF is smaller and fast
for people with Graphical User Interfaces.

  My two cents,

  -- Hank