Martin Darwin wrote: > > On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Frank A. Vorstenbosch wrote: > > > *bzzzzt* wrong! thank you for playing... > > > > I'd say that raw postscript is more likely to be understood by people > > (including all those that can't run Acrobat), or GIF is a good choice > > because anyone capable of browsing the web graphically can see gifs. > > Well, from a quick look at the adobe page, Acrobat reader works on quite a > few systems (Win95,NT,3.1,Mac,Linux,AIX,SunOS,Solaris,IRIX,Hp-UX,Digital > Unix, OS/2). That's a pretty good list IMHO. The only two OS's they are > missing that I know of are DOS (no graphics anyway) and AmigaOS. Besides > you need Acrobat to view almost all datasheets (unless you are getting > them in printed form). I'm sure I can list at least as many as you did that don't have an Acrobat reader. > Postscript ends up being a pain in the ass if you don't have a postscript > printer (i.e. having to get Ghostscript et al.) [snip] OK, lets examine this in a bit more detail: Case 1: You run one of the operating systems that you listed above. In that case, either a Postscript or a PDF file would be OK, because your system runs both Ghostview and Acrobat. Case 2: You run any operating system that doesn't support Acrobat but does run Ghostview. In this case, you can view Postscript and (with some restrictions) use it to view PDF. Case 3: Any other operating system. You can't view PDF files at all, but if you happen to have a Postscript printer around (as anyone should have) you still can view Postscript. So for case 1 doesn't make a difference, whereas in cases 2 and 3 the open Postscript wins over closed Acrobat. In many cases, Postscript files are human readable to some extent, so if you're desparate you can still read it. PDF files are usually compressed and therefore not readable -- for example you can't do a grep on a whole directory of PDFs to find a particular one like you can with PS. Enough about this... Frank ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Frank A. Vorstenbosch Phone: 0181 - 636 3000 Electronics and Software Engineer Mobile: 0976 - 430 569 Eidos Technologies Ltd., Wimbledon, London Email: fav@eidos.co.uk