Roy Greason wrote: > Please excuse my ignorance but what is this PDF? I keep seeing > references to it but none that indicate what it is. I figured that > it may be some way of formating PCB information, but I may be > totally wrong. Well, it can be used for PCB layouts, but it's much more general than that. PDF stands for Portable Document Format, and it is the file format used by the Adobe Acrobat system. The Acrobat Reader, which can work stand-alone or as a Web browser plug-in, is freely available from Adobe, via the Net. In terms of capabilities, PDF is similar to PostScript (in fact it's fundamentally a compressed form of PostScript). This means it can accurately reproduce a document, unlike HTML which encodes a document's logical layout only, and has poor graphic capability. It has become popular because the reader is free, and Adobe markets tools to produce PDF from any application that can produce PostScript (which includes anything that can print under Windows). PDF files can also have hyperlinks and tables of contents, and new features will allow a web server to deliver a page at a time and other nice features. There has been some grumbling from certain quarters about the widespread use of PDF, for two main reasons; firstly it's a proprietary format and secondly it is not supported under DOS (though it is supported on most popular platforms, including Windows, Unix and the Mac). -- Clyde Smith-Stubbs | HI-TECH Software, | Voice: +61 7 3354 2411 clyde@hitech.com.au | P.O. Box 103, Alderley, | Fax: +61 7 3354 2422 http://www.hitech.com.au | QLD, 4051, AUSTRALIA. | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- For info on the World's best C cross compilers for embedded systems, point your WWW browser at http://www.hitech.com.au, or email info@hitech.com.au