Adobe Acrobat format for documentation

[Clive Page]

In article <608n3d$qjb at post.gsfc.nasa.gov>,
William Thompson <thompson at orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov> wrote:
>
>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.
>

I'm afraid that I agree with Lucio Chiapetti and others who don't like
Adobe Acrobat.  I get an increasing number of documents in this format and
find them a real pain.  On our Unix systems here we now have to keep two
different versions of the Acroread program, because some .PDF files can be
read on one and not the other, and vice-versa, and I also find that some
documents can be read on my screen but not printed out.   Presumably there
is some non-upwards-compatibility in the Acrobat format, but I have no
idea what it is and no idea in advance which incoming files require which
version of the reader.   

As far as I know, the Acrobat format is proprietary and non-published.  I
very much hope that astronomers will stick to using formats which are easy
to use and in the public domain, even if this means the files are a little
larger.

-- 
-- 
Clive Page,
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,        
University of Leicester.