Heck, in some cases it is difficult to even change the paper format of a pdf without affecting the layout.
It's very easy to resize a PDF. Just select "fit to page".
and about the commercial apps: They have to rely on OCR-like features
No, you can ger the text directly (in most cases), unless the publisher has deliberately obfuscated it.
print it on less paper,
Lots of tools, even built in to the printer driver, to do this, 2-up, 4-up, etc. (PDF were designed fro publishing, you need to do this a lot.)
PDF is only usefull if you never expect anybody to do anything else besides printing or viewing it on screen.
In most cases where PDF is used nowadays, this asumption is false (or the publisher just does not care).
I think it's more that this is a very easy way to make a downloadable version of a document originally designed for print. Most export to HTML methods suck and need a lot of tweaking. There is a LOT of dcoumentation online in PDF that the manufacturers would never have bothered with making accessible if it required more work for them.
The rest of your remarks are to do with changing the text; admitted that's not easy. But not extremely hard either.
Try to export a table from a pdf, and you might change your mind
heck, try to export text in columns at all, or mathematic formulas, or anything besides plain text or graphics.
Then try to do that automatically for a lot of pages.
Why would you want to do this anyway? You'll just end up with anoher document. Use the PDF. Works on screen, works in print, searchable. However, it isn't easy to modify, but you're meant to go back to your layout app to do that, so it's not suitable for a Wiki-style document that is frequently changed.
As for text in columns, there is an area text select tool that does that. People who really want to convert the whole file can use (commercial) apps that do this quite effectively.
Wouldn't a simple print-screen copy the text and diagrams into a format which can be freely distributed?
PDFs can be freely distributed. The format is open, lots of free (in every sense) software can use or make them. A screen print is a low res image; and probably much larger than the PDF, in many separate files, with fuzzy text and no text search abilities.
can use the five minutes that it takes Acrobat to load to do something productive.
From a FAQ:
Adobe Reader 6.0 is terribly slow. How can I speed it up?
Adobe Reader 6.0 can be dreadfully slow. You can speed it up by disabling unused Adobe Reader plugins. To do this, copy all items in the Adobe Reader plug_ins folder to the Adobe Reader optional folder, except for the following:
eBook.api EWH32.api Search.api
It has been reported that without the additional plugins, Adobe Reader can start up in as little as 15% of the original startup time. If you need functionality provided by other plugins, simply copy them back from the optional folder to the plug_ins folder
I don't like 32+MB acrobat applications hanging around doing nothing when you load a PDF into the browser.
I use Acrobat 4, it works with almost every PDF around. The reader is about 2 MB. The full Acrobat 4 is 2.8 MB. Add some for dlls and plugins (hint: you can speed up loading remarkably by hiding all the plugins you don't need). I don't intend to upgrade till forced. Ghostview can do a decent job, it's slower and clunkier though.
All a protocol spec needs to be is a nice txt file
Thoough you can describe anything in words, diagrams can often explain technical concepts much more clearly and compactly. PDFs are ideal for combined text and diagrams. If they aren't locked down (using Adobe's DRM) you can easily copy and paste both text and diagrams from PDFs. They are harder to modify, but you can overlay fairly easily with notes.
I use Sneakemail for that. But though that's great for dealing with websites and mailing lists, etc; the proble mcomes from your friends who disseminate your address through cluelessness.
This news is enough for RIAA:
They will start a fresh more intensive drive to put the falling sales on "piracy" and "file sharing"...
Though page 1 of TFA blames file sharing, page 2 says:
the future of music retailers looks particularly bleak since they also face cut-throat competition from online shopping malls. "Online shopping malls offered totally predatory pricing below cost just to establish their customer base, and they succeeded," Jang said. "Now many die-hard music fans who were our loyal customers moved to such Web sites where they could buy what they want more easily at a cheaper price."
And later
"Now they just sit back and complain about those illegal downloading sites, while offering few alternatives for music fans to get music online," said Park. "If we shut down all file-sharing sites right now, will it be able to revive stagnant music sales? I don't think so," he said.
And which one makes (ever made) a better office suite?
WordPerfect, Lotus Word, etc, etc, etc. I was quite happy with Wordstar 5 and Lotus 123 v 2 myself, it's only the file format lock in that keeps MS untouchable.
Who makes a better media player? Answer: Nobody
Media players are a dime a dozen, really. WinAmp does it for me. Real could too; except being squeezed out of the desktop had made them desperate for income and they filled their install with intrusive marketing crap.
If you spam-armor your address whenever you make it available, you won't get spam.
Yes you will. Eventually, someone who has your address in their address book will be hit my a spam worm, which will send out spam both to and fronm your address, spreading it all over. Or a clueless friend will put it in a CC when sending a joke out to his friends. Or someone will dig it up in a list of addresses from your ISP. Etc, etc.
. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that terrorists were using Indymedia's forums to communicate (or course the same could be said of any site that lets people post random stuff).
They'd be morons to use a site that was identified as sympathetic to their cause. As witness the takedown, it'd obviously be under close scrutiny. There are millions of blogs and bulletin boards, usenet, etc etc thay could use. No to mention this fine waste of bandwidth.
but its practical realization may prove to be very difficult. Those "rare books" you were referring to may well be books from the XVIIth, XVIIIth or XIXth century. While not printed on the trashy acid paper from the XXth century, they are nevertheless fragile. Scanning them may be impossible...
A librarian's job is the care of books. They can digitise them without destroying them. They've done it for Egyptian papyrus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, I think they can manage. Basically, if a book can be read it can be scanned (maybe not on your handy home USB scanner though).
some manuscripts are viewed only by special light,
I really doubt whether a single exposure to bright light for a few seconds will produce any harm. But if it were thought to do so, a longer exposre at low light levels (or maybe infra red, UV or whatever gives the best result) would do the job.
I might umm, sound insensitive, but are you missing legs or something? Libraries are one of the easiest places to get to in pretty much every community
We're specifically talking about the Library of Congress, which has millions of books, not your local library with maybe 100k or so (I rememeber my university had about 800k books, probably a million by now). The idea is not to give access to the NYT bestsellers, but rare books that you would have a hard time finding anywhere else.
As a novel, The Mezonic Agenda will not compete with books from Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum.
Thank God for that. Clancy is an over-the-hill fart who writes books the size, weight and clarity of bricks. Ludlum wrote ridiculous conspiracy-theory novels almost as fat. I regret every minute of my life they've wasted (in moments of weakness, on vactation, I did pick up and read some of these). Like Macdonald's, the aroma is enticing, the anticipation is acute, the after-taste is regret at what you've done to your body (mind).
Actually, copyright is automatic, but you need a way to prove it. If I seal up a copy of my book and mail it to myself, the postmark is good enough to verify copyright in court, once the package is unsealed and verified by the court.
A common myth. You could put anything in a package, unsealed, mail it to yourself, getting the postmark. At any later time you could replace the contents and then seal it. Unless you can find a way to prove you mailed a sealed package, it doesn't prove anything.
But you can just ask someone (anyone, but a notary would of course be better) to sign and date the bound copy (or each page), or chop and sign on a seal.
Wounded Pilots Land Norway Plane After Axe Attack An Algerian-born man attacked two pilots and a passenger with an axe on a domestic Norwegian flight on Wednesday in an unexplained assault that police said could be linked to his asylum status.
The pilots, who witnesses said were covered in blood from head injuries, managed to land the small Kato Air plane flying seven passengers from Narvik to Bodoe in northern Norway.
Of course it's as likely as not to be terrorism by stupid white american kids, but attempting to kill several hundred people at once is certainly an attempt at mass murder, and quite probably a terrorist act.
Terrorism is violence with the intention of having a political effect. Generally, most actions by the militarty fall under that defintion, but they're usually excluded if certain niceties are observed (wearing uniforms, declaring war, trying not to kill civilians). Nutjobs who massacre people, even a planeload of people, because the jocks bullied them or Jesus told then to aren't terrorists.
Also, I have to say, hitting an eyeball in an aeroplane travelling hundreds of knots, several miles high, is extremely high tech or extremely bad luck.
Do like the old jet bomber pilots used to do...put an eye patch on. When the brilliant light blinds you in one eye, switch the patch over to the other eye.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't make a plural with an apostrophe!
I thought he was trying to make an acute accent (clichés).
Not to mention "cliche's". It's an acute accent (clichés), not an apostrophe.
It's very easy to resize a PDF. Just select "fit to page".
and about the commercial apps: They have to rely on OCR-like features
No, you can ger the text directly (in most cases), unless the publisher has deliberately obfuscated it.
print it on less paper,
Lots of tools, even built in to the printer driver, to do this, 2-up, 4-up, etc. (PDF were designed fro publishing, you need to do this a lot.)
PDF is only usefull if you never expect anybody to do anything else besides printing or viewing it on screen. In most cases where PDF is used nowadays, this asumption is false (or the publisher just does not care).
I think it's more that this is a very easy way to make a downloadable version of a document originally designed for print. Most export to HTML methods suck and need a lot of tweaking. There is a LOT of dcoumentation online in PDF that the manufacturers would never have bothered with making accessible if it required more work for them.
The rest of your remarks are to do with changing the text; admitted that's not easy. But not extremely hard either.
Why would you want to do this anyway? You'll just end up with anoher document. Use the PDF. Works on screen, works in print, searchable. However, it isn't easy to modify, but you're meant to go back to your layout app to do that, so it's not suitable for a Wiki-style document that is frequently changed.
As for text in columns, there is an area text select tool that does that. People who really want to convert the whole file can use (commercial) apps that do this quite effectively.
PDFs can be freely distributed. The format is open, lots of free (in every sense) software can use or make them. A screen print is a low res image; and probably much larger than the PDF, in many separate files, with fuzzy text and no text search abilities.
can use the five minutes that it takes Acrobat to load to do something productive.
From a FAQ:
Adobe Reader 6.0 is terribly slow. How can I speed it up?
Adobe Reader 6.0 can be dreadfully slow. You can speed it up by disabling unused Adobe Reader plugins. To do this, copy all items in the Adobe Reader plug_ins folder to the Adobe Reader optional folder, except for the following:
eBook.api
EWH32.api
Search.api
It has been reported that without the additional plugins, Adobe Reader can start up in as little as 15% of the original startup time. If you need functionality provided by other plugins, simply copy them back from the optional folder to the plug_ins folder
I use Acrobat 4, it works with almost every PDF around. The reader is about 2 MB. The full Acrobat 4 is 2.8 MB. Add some for dlls and plugins (hint: you can speed up loading remarkably by hiding all the plugins you don't need). I don't intend to upgrade till forced. Ghostview can do a decent job, it's slower and clunkier though.
Thoough you can describe anything in words, diagrams can often explain technical concepts much more clearly and compactly. PDFs are ideal for combined text and diagrams. If they aren't locked down (using Adobe's DRM) you can easily copy and paste both text and diagrams from PDFs. They are harder to modify, but you can overlay fairly easily with notes.
FU2
RTFA: "emergency calls and calls made outside theaters and other performance spaces must not be affected."
I use Sneakemail for that. But though that's great for dealing with websites and mailing lists, etc; the proble mcomes from your friends who disseminate your address through cluelessness.
Though page 1 of TFA blames file sharing, page 2 says:
And laterWordPerfect, Lotus Word, etc, etc, etc. I was quite happy with Wordstar 5 and Lotus 123 v 2 myself, it's only the file format lock in that keeps MS untouchable.
Who makes a better media player? Answer: Nobody
Media players are a dime a dozen, really. WinAmp does it for me. Real could too; except being squeezed out of the desktop had made them desperate for income and they filled their install with intrusive marketing crap.
Yes you will. Eventually, someone who has your address in their address book will be hit my a spam worm, which will send out spam both to and fronm your address, spreading it all over. Or a clueless friend will put it in a CC when sending a joke out to his friends. Or someone will dig it up in a list of addresses from your ISP. Etc, etc.
They'd be morons to use a site that was identified as sympathetic to their cause. As witness the takedown, it'd obviously be under close scrutiny. There are millions of blogs and bulletin boards, usenet, etc etc thay could use. No to mention this fine waste of bandwidth.
I wrote:
>>We're specifically talking about the Library of Congress
Somne AC wrote:
>If you read the grandparent, you'll see that the person was refering to public libraries in general, not the LOC.
I was talking about the original post. What we are talking about. OK?
A librarian's job is the care of books. They can digitise them without destroying them. They've done it for Egyptian papyrus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, I think they can manage. Basically, if a book can be read it can be scanned (maybe not on your handy home USB scanner though).
some manuscripts are viewed only by special light,
I really doubt whether a single exposure to bright light for a few seconds will produce any harm. But if it were thought to do so, a longer exposre at low light levels (or maybe infra red, UV or whatever gives the best result) would do the job.
We're specifically talking about the Library of Congress, which has millions of books, not your local library with maybe 100k or so (I rememeber my university had about 800k books, probably a million by now). The idea is not to give access to the NYT bestsellers, but rare books that you would have a hard time finding anywhere else.
Thank God for that. Clancy is an over-the-hill fart who writes books the size, weight and clarity of bricks. Ludlum wrote ridiculous conspiracy-theory novels almost as fat. I regret every minute of my life they've wasted (in moments of weakness, on vactation, I did pick up and read some of these). Like Macdonald's, the aroma is enticing, the anticipation is acute, the after-taste is regret at what you've done to your body (mind).
Backup.
A common myth. You could put anything in a package, unsealed, mail it to yourself, getting the postmark. At any later time you could replace the contents and then seal it. Unless you can find a way to prove you mailed a sealed package, it doesn't prove anything.
But you can just ask someone (anyone, but a notary would of course be better) to sign and date the bound copy (or each page), or chop and sign on a seal.
And "Marvel superheros". What's a "heros"?**
.
.
.
[*Frances is a name; "France's" is a national possessive.
**Plural of "hero" is "heroes".]
Lasrs? Chainsaws? Who needs hi-tech, use an axe:
Wounded Pilots Land Norway Plane After Axe Attack
An Algerian-born man attacked two pilots and a passenger with an axe on a domestic Norwegian flight on Wednesday in an unexplained assault that police said could be linked to his asylum status.
The pilots, who witnesses said were covered in blood from head injuries, managed to land the small Kato Air plane flying seven passengers from Narvik to Bodoe in northern Norway.
Terrorism is violence with the intention of having a political effect. Generally, most actions by the militarty fall under that defintion, but they're usually excluded if certain niceties are observed (wearing uniforms, declaring war, trying not to kill civilians). Nutjobs who massacre people, even a planeload of people, because the jocks bullied them or Jesus told then to aren't terrorists.
Also, I have to say, hitting an eyeball in an aeroplane travelling hundreds of knots, several miles high, is extremely high tech or extremely bad luck.
Why bother switching the patch? Just take it off.