On 2 jul 2009, at 10:47, Yaakov Stein wrote:
Due to his diminished eyesight he can't handle the text
of the document he is co-authoring without significant preprocessing.
Ok if we're going to have this discussion again:
PDF is a way to display documents on the screen the same way that
would appear on paper. Since screen and paper have different
limitations, that usually entails pretty significant compromises. It's
also extremely hard to build home grown tools to scrape PDF files.
Even copy/paste from PDF is a challenge. So making PDF the
authoritative version (let alone the only version) we create more
problems than we solve. Exit PDF.
A much better solution would be HTML, if it's sufficiently
constrained. HTML allows for the reflowing of text, solving issues
with text and screen sizes. It's also extremely widely implemented, so
it's easy to display reasonably well without special tools. It also
allows for semantic tagging, allowing for easy scraping.
Last but not least, just filter out anything between < and > and
replace a few &xxx; sequences and you're back to plain text. We could
probably even format RFCs such that if you remove the HTML, you're
left with the current ASCII format.
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