Adobe Acrobat format for documentation

[William Thompson]

tim at lothar.as.arizona.edu (Tim Pickering) writes:

>On 22 Sep 1997 18:17:22 GMT, William Thompson wrote:
>>
>>I think that supplying the FITS documentation would be very helpful to users,
>>since for many platforms the PDF viewers are more capable than PostScript
>>viewers, and since the PDF files are smaller than the PostScript files.
>>However, I would agree with the statement that the PDF files should augment
>>rather than supplant the PostScript files--not everyone has a PDF viewer, and
>>there are still platforms that Adobe Acrobat does not run on.
>>
>>William Thompson

>adobe acrobat is not a necessary prerequisite for viewing PDF files.
>recent versions (>4.00) of aladdin ghostscript can understand PDF as
>well as postscript. the latest version can be found at
>ftp.cs.wisc.edu:/ghost/aladdin. i know that recent versions of (>3)
>ghostview fully support these PDF capabilities and i think that for
>unix machines ghostview 3 or newer is far superior to acroread as a
>PDF reader.  

Thank you.  I'm in the process of building the lastest version of Ghostscript
now.  (It doesn't appear to be for the fainthearted.)  I've used xpdf myself in
the past, which is fairly primitive.  I've also recently installed acroread on
those machines which are running Digital Unix (OSF/v4) although it doesn't run
on our OSF/v3 machines.  It seems that there are PDF files that acroread can
handle which xpdf cannot.

I still stand by my opinion, which I hope you share, that supplying the
documentation in PDF format is a good idea, but that they should also continue
to be supplied in PostScript format.

Bill Thompson