To my mind, pdf currently offers the best compromise between printability
(which everyone seems to agree is important) and on-line viewability.  I
could wish for improvements in both, but it's not bad at all.  The biggest
problem seems to be that data sheets intended for printing tend to have
really small fonts by display standards, so it's difficult to get a "full
page" displayed on a monitor at any one time (and of course screen and page
aspect ratios are a complete mis-match.)

Someone mentioned that pdf files couldn't be searched.  The last time I
downloaded acrobat (3.0, I think), a search feature was one of the
downloadable options, so perhaps that HAS improved...

(now, a natural language database capable of searching and printing data
sheets with pdf quality...  That would be sweet!)

BillW
cisco