Q: Postscript and PDF

[Peter F Davis]

[This message has also been posted.]
On Thu, 27 Mar 1997 18:20:53 +0100, Lucio Chiappetti
<lucio at ifctr.mi.cnr.it> wrote: 

>   - what would be the advantages and disadvantages of using PDF compared
>     with postscript ?

PDF can be thought of as a dialect of PostScript.  It was developed to
use the PostScript imaging model, but to define a subset of the
language which could be easily parsed and understood by applications
without requiring a full-blown PostScript interpreter.

Not everyone can read/print PostScript files.  It requires either a
PostScript printer or some kind of interpreter/viewer/printer software
such as Ghostscript.

PDF, on the other hand, can be viewed and printed with a free utility
which can be downloaded from Adobe's Web site.  This is available for
Macs, Windows, and (I believe) many flavors of Unix.

>   - what are the implication in terms of word processors (as far as I know
>     MS Word or Latex can't produce it ; otherwise said, how is it
>     generated?) 

Some word processors are able to generate PDF.  In other cases, a
separate utility is needed.  Adobe has Acrobat Distiller, which is a
commercial utility.  I believe Aladdin Ghostscript (freeware) can also
do this, but it takes a little effort to set it up and make it work.

If all the readers of your documents are also producers, there may be
no advantage to PDF, since you need PostScript capable utilities to
produce it anyway.  PDF wins in a situation where you have a few
authors, who can be equipped with the appropriate utilities so that a
large number of people can read the documents with freely available
software. 

>   - what are the implications in terms of printing ? does one need to convert
>     to postscript to print it on the current printers ?

The Acrobat viewer can print PDF documents.


-- 
				Peter Davis
			http://world.std.com/~pd

	    "If you can't behave yourself, who can you behave?"