Adobe Acrobat format for documentation

[Rob Seaman]

Lucio Chiappetti <lucio at ifctr.mi.cnr.it> writes:

> I enclose some results of a query to comp.lang.postscript I had a while ago
> (we were considering use of pdf vs postscript for documentation within a
> multi-institute project. We ended up sticking to ms-word and postscript)

[various comments from various people - it wasn't always obvious who]

>> One can use Ghostscript to convert Postscript to PDF, but the quality
>> of the resulting PDF file is not great.Or one can buy Adobe Acrobat
>> (or Exchange or whatever the correct name is - sorry I don't recall,
>> nor do I really care) for (if my memory serves me) $295.

In the U.S., educational pricing for the Adobe package (for the Mac/PC
anyway) is around $40.  They've also released their OCR update - this
supports converting a PostScript bitmap back into ascii, for instance.

The various Adobe PDF tools do offer very good control over fonts and
embedded graphics, that your typical word processing package won't.
It's also easy to print to a PDF pseudo-printer from any application
that would support a PostScript printer.

>> On the other hand, anybody can read/print/write Postscript, as there's
>> lots of freely available software to do so plus many printers on the
>> market can print Postscript files directly - user just needs to send
>> that file to the printer, and - unlike PDF - it will end up on the paper.

Well, this is ideally true, but there are plenty of PostScript files out
there that are not straightforward to print - typically due to missing
fonts or a missing platform dependent preamble.  A growing niche in the
graphics community is for "pre-flight" software to verify that a
particular print job will complete as intended.

Also, capable PostScript viewers are still not really very widespread.

>> The Acrobat viewer can convert PDF file to Postscript and spool
>> it to the printer. Now - if your printer understands Postscript,
>> all good and well. Otherwise - you guessed it.

I've had no problem printing to a non-PostScript Mac inkjet from Acrobat.

It seems silly to cast this as a PostScript versus PDF argument, since
the same company (Adobe) developed both.  Suitably crafted PostScript
is preferable for printing.  PDF is preferable for viewing - nobody has
mentioned the embedded links and other indexing options, for instance.
Changing display resolutions seems quick and simple with Acrobat, but
not with the PostScript viewers I've seen.

Acrobat also is available as a web browser plug-in.  The real debate
should be PDF versus html for online documentation.

Rob
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