John C Klensin wrote:
PDF/A is considered stable by the archival / depository
librarians, whose traditional criterion for stability
involves a considerably longer timeframe than even the IETF.
Yes. And clearly we can't pick DejaVu, but when it goes
to archival formats without fonts DejaVu is interesting.
Just because it is patented does not mean that it is bad,
and similar just because PDF/A is an ISO standard doesn't
mean that it is good (for the IETF).
For your limited purpose of "attach some images" TAR is
a respectible container format, it is likely a part of a
POSIX standard.
Ordinary W2K users like me can go to a command prompt and
say pax, so it's builtin on a MS platform (I can't say if
that's still the case for XP and Vista). For those folks
actually testing this now, simply abort pax with ^Break :-)
For my TGZ proposal we'd know where to find the gzip RFCs.
No other contemporary image, image-file, or page definition
format comes even close whether you (or I) "like it better"
or not.
IBTD, image formats like GIF, JPG, and PNG are very popular.
My SWF proposal was in parts a joke. I mentioned it, because
from my POV *everything* including SWF is better than PDF.
I'd prefer ODF, ooXML, RAR, and CHM in no particular order.
And two of them have an ISO number, if that's what it takes.
I had enough trouble with PDFs. I'm now on a platform where
I can *read* most PDFs. It requires about 100 MB disk space,
occasional security updates from scratch (try it over a V.90
line), and many 1 MB PDFs boil down to 1000 ASCII characters.
Which is kind of beside the point, because you want PDF as a
mere container for pictures. So what is wrong with say SVG,
if you think that PNG isn't as popular as PDF ?
Frank
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