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Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org

2005-11-07 12:34:37
Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

he's obviously stupid.
More likely the author is simply thoughtless.

An extreme case of "thoghtless", because the size difference
from plain to PDF is huge, I'd guess about a factor 50, from
plain to HTML it's only a factor 2.

plain text email markup works a lot less well than properly
designed HTML.

My stoneage MUA tries to display HTML as HTML if available,
and your experiment here was hard to read, you used a rather
small font.  IMHO it's okay if folks use HTML _iff_ necessary
in mail, sometimes (rarely) I also do it, trimming the MIME
overhead to a minimum manually - so that others with a plain
text UA might still find what I intended to say.

RfC 1855 got it wrong, monospaced fonts like Courier are still
the best choice for mail, and that won't change in my lifetime.

IETF documents are dreadful to print out

type rfc1234.txt > prn  is pretty simple, they come complete
with formfeeds.  Admittedly the number of RfCs or I-Ds I ever
printed is zero.

they will only print on -printers with a particular font and
a particular size of paper.

Don't send them to your "xyz" printer driver, they are already
formatted, send them directly to /dev/lpt1 or similar.  Or use
a "dumb" driver.   Or better don't waste paper to print RfCs,
they are available online whereever you are... -)

every two weeks acrobat asks to upgrade itself

Works for the as you said "most popular O/S on the planet" and
the reader.  And at least there are upgrades for this O/S and
some others, it's less funny with my less popular OS/2.

But some PDFs generated with open office still work with my
old Acroreader 3, no "colorspace 6 not found" or other issues
like "cannot extract embedded font".  And why should I want
any embedded fonts, my OS/2 has a nice Adobe Courier, a nice
Adobe Hevetica, even some ugly Times New Roman, that should
be good enough for anything I care about (excl. math.)

it can't upgrade my copy which is the paid version, not the
free one.

Maybe test this open office beast if you want to create PDFs
"visible with any AcroReader", i.e, 3 or better. <eg>  That's
a new "law", good stuff is always version 3.x, DOS, PDF, HTML,
Warp, what else ?
                           Bye, Frank




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