Re: TeX/LaTeX isn't easy

Nathan Sanders wrote:
I knew it was a PDF before I clicked the link, ergo it was marked.

Nonsense. By that logic, all links to PDF files are "marked", since
whoever put the damn links there in the first page presumably knows
they link to PDFs.

To make it plain for the class dunce here, I'll be very specific: it
should be obvious at a glance to a technically-unsavvy user that it
isn't a normal link. Preferably, linked from a gateway page with
information about the contents, and with at least a summary available
without downloading a PDF.

What would you expect to find in a file called manual.pdf on the Ant
homepage, recipes for BBQ chicken? The information is there for
anyone competent enough to see it. (Anyone not competent enough is
likely not the target audience for Ant.)

For "competent" substitute "having technical expertise". That may be
true, but irrelevant; good Web usability practises are what they are,
and even technically knowledgeable people don't like being blindsided
by PDF, or not being able to research something reasonably thoroughly
*before* downloading offline content and/or executables.

Again with your lies!

That's it. You are expelled, Mister. This lesson is through. You get an
F. Go put on your dunce cap and find someplace in the shallower end of
the online IQ pool to hang out (based on my calculation of your IQ, I
recommend AOL chatrooms).

I defy you to find anyone who has the interest and capability to try
Ant, but who has a connection that would require them spending an hour
downloading an 830 MB file.

It DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. Nobody wants to have to download 4/5 of a
gig just to find out what the ***, exactly, something is, does, and
doesn't do. And for no other piece of software (including other
TeX-associated software) have I found the online, html-format
documentation inadequate to decide whether to go ahead and download
hundreds of megs of possibly-crap or not.

Then by all means, don't use Ant. I don't (though not because of some
perverse belief that PDFs are inherently evil).

The lucrative Nielsen Norman group shares that belief (regarding PDFs
on the Web in lieu of browseable HTML information, rather than
separate, *additional* downloadable whitepapers and such that you can
make at least an initial assessment without). If they're wrong and
"perverse", why are they rolling in it? They must be doing *something*
right.

Who pays for the time spent building the informational web pages that
would match your idiosyncratic specifications?

They have their motivations for building the site, and the software.
Assuming they want wider use and appreciation, making more information
more accessible would only be to their advantage, vis a vis their
presumed goals. If their intent is to be cryptic and drive most
interested folk away by not giving out much information before asking
you to click "OK" to a download, then fine -- they can be that way, and
people can stay away in droves, but if they start wondering why Ant
isn't attracting as much attention as they think it deserves, they can
start by taking a look at the bare-bones nature of the home page and
its failure to be reliably found by googling for "ant not tex". And
there's no excuse for the poor search ranking -- it's clearly the most
relevant site (of very few) for that query, and any idiot with access
to some blogs that accept anonymous comments can googlebomb something
rare like "ant not tex" to give any desired result for "I'm feeling
lucky". Nevermind someone who can code a typesetting system that,
apparently, is usable.

How many of them would have any interest in Ant?

More than actually do, if information about it were more readily
available before clicking "Download" somewhere.

You claimed the download was "multi-megs".

I was referring to online documentation in PDF-only format in general.
It's invariably a lot huger than the HTML file that would be adequate
for most people to decide whether to delve deeper or move on. And it
requires reading offline or using a plugin. The plugin in question is
notorious for causing browser misbehavior -- lockups and crashes, in
both IE and Firefox. The offline reader is, at least, stable, but you
might have to track THAT down and download it too. (At least most
browsers these days will auto-fetch the plugin if they don't have it
already.)

There's also the fact that there were also executables under discussion
(or archives, or installers).

Not being able to get information about whether one large download will
be worth it without another large download isn't exactly a shining
example of Web usability.

Don't get all huffy. If you don't want to get called out for lying or
for being a troll, then don't do it. The file is about 830 KB

You said something about a file of nearly a gigabyte earlier. That one
DOES qualify for "multi-meg". Calling it "multi-meg" would be an
understatement, as a matter of fact. If some "large" types of file are
sometimes "only" 1 meg, the ones that are nearly a gig are a decent
counterweight. Using a *geometric* mean that gives us 33 megs as the
"generic case" (versus a less-generous 501 or so for the arithmetic
mean).

There's nothing trollish about considering files that collectively have
a geometric mean size of 33 megs to be "multi-meg".

Most of the world still is,

Yet another non sequitur. No one else was expected to download the
Ant manual, so no one else's net connection is relevant here.

We are discussing the site's usability. That must take into
consideration people other than you and I.

Non sequitur. Please cite where I said anything about America.

Explicitly? You didn't. But you show your America-centrism when you
assume that everyone has cheap, flat-rate broadband and will willingly
download files exceeding 800K as readily as they download another 2K
Web page.

Preview, Foxit Reader, xPDF, PDFViewer, Evince, Brava Reader, KPDF,
Sumatra PDF, any web browser with a PDF plug-in, and plenty of others.

Most of these I haven't heard of. If they're obscure, they don't count;
for most people, "PDF viewer" is synonymous with "Acrobat Reader" and
you know it. One you didn't mention was Ghostscript/Ghostview, but the
rendering blows (no antialiasing, I think -- it always looks ugly and
blocky, with doubled rows and columns of pixels) and the setup sucks
(techie-oriented, non-intuitive -- meanwhile MiKTeX is meant purely for
a technical audience and sets up more easily, whereas ordinary Joes may
want to view the odd .eps file and the only free viewer for that format
that I ever saw anywhere was GSView). As for the Web browsers, those
don't count, since they become PDF viewers only with the addition of
the Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in, which makes this equivalent to using
the stand-alone reader, except that, for some added bonus fun, you get
to lose all your open tab locations and histories in your browser if it
blows chunks.

I never open Acrobat any more, except when I want to modify an
existing PDF.

Non sequitur. We were discussing Acrobat Reader, not the authoring tool
Acrobat. The only reasons to use Acrobat over MiKTeX for pdf authoring
are a) you're rich and non-technical, so you won't want to even try to
make TeX work but can purchase Acrobat with whatever you find between
your sofa cushions, b) you're poor and non-technical and so won't
bother with TeX's steep learning curve when you can torrent Acrobat
illegally, or c) you're downright evil and wish to make PDFs with DRM
restrictions.

If your browser doesn't display the link target, then your browser is
broken. In mine, when I hover the mouse over the link...

....whatever happens is irrelevant. "Clearly marked" means obvious at a
glance, numbnuts.

.

Loading