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RE: Alternative formats for IDs

2006-01-01 14:36:05
--On Sunday, 01 January, 2006 12:48 -0800 "william(at)elan.net"
<william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net> wrote:

...
BTW - PDF also still rather "fluid" format with multiple
versions and not always clear if PDF you create could be read
by all readers in the same way you intended. So if PDF is as
format, then exact version must be specified as well.

I've still got some misgivings about PDF because one of my
requirements is to be able to extract things from documents and
mark them up.  That requirement applies to RFCs but much more
strongly to I-Ds, where excepting as part of discussions of the
drafts is extremely important.  And I've discovered that marking
up PDF documents, and sometimes extracting things from them,
seems to often require very expensive tools, not just a freeware
reader.  Even with (most of?) those tools, if the PDF
essentially consists of images of the relevant pages, rather
than page description information plus the text, reliably
extracting pieces of text is reasonably hopeless.

However...

This is just for my education, since I haven't followed PDF's
evolution closely enough to know the answer.  Is the description
of PDF in RFC 3778 sufficiently specific wrt versions and
feature sets that a reference to that document plus some
test/verification tools would be sufficient to define a version
for IETF use?  Is that version adequately supported by stable,
readily-available and inexpensive tools on multiple platforms?
Or would we need something else in terms of either definition or
reading/extracting tools?

     john


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