Re: Winfixer etc

greybeard spake thus:

"cat" <cat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:b6ph125451rlv0qrr31geiriphupohh4if@xxxxxxxxxx

On Sat, 11 Mar 2006 19:19:16 -0600, "greybeard"
<greybeard@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> purred

PDF, which I consider a disgusting format,

Wow you must not work with printable graphics much. In that
area PDF is pretty much the only way to send art between machines.

DXF and DWG formats provide most of what I'm after and give some relatively inexpensive methods of editing, as well as being able to covert to other formats. However, when I have a 400 page manual and it's all surrounded by a wide, very colorful, very ink wasting border, I would prefer not to pay for the ink. When the print quality is set as "high" by adope, it only means that the manual should be printed in a week to ten days and still have no more of the information I need than if printed in draft quality. When the manual is set for "landscape", it won't fit in a normal 3 ring binder and I hate loose sheets in an envelope, that manual won't be printed, nor the program uxed. As far as artists go, I'm aware that they fuss over every tiny detail, but when I want information, graphic details don't mean a lot except they're in the way.

You know, I can appreciate your misgivings about Micro$oft and all--I happen to share a lot of them--but there's a point where this kind of concern crosses over into pure Luddite-ism, and you've clearly crossed that line. Apparently you think that supporting antiquated, "legacy" systems is somehow more important that information interchange.

For instance, the battle you're fighting over PDF is long, long, over, and the Portable Document Format has won by every measure. Which is a good thing--*even though this format is sometimes misused*.

(By the way, your preference for DXF and DWG formats is not a good one. There are relatively few applications that use these formats, compared to PDF. If one were doing CAD work, they'd be a good choice.)

I used to own a small print shop. I received a lot of the files for things I was supposed to print for my customers via email. I learned to love PDF. Absolutely love it. What other format is there that you can just drop into InDesign and have it print *exactly as the customer wanted it*. No fucking around with missing fonts, wrong color schemes, wrong sizes--I remember a piece, a full bleed with a critical trim around the outside, that was absolutely spot on--or any of the other crap a printer has to put up with when they get a "print file" in Word, Publisher (yecch!) or some other misapplication.

PDF is here to stay. Some standard like it is clearly needed, and it seems to fit that need admirably. Maybe you need to get off dial-up[1], wake up and smell the coffee, and quit whining about how all this newfangled stuff just doesn't play nicely with your good old reliable 25x80 green-screen dot-matrix 256Kb scheme of things. I think we've moved past that point, technologically speaking.

[1] I used dial-up, 'cause I'm cheap; I just don't whine about it.


--
Second, Scientologists are like computers trying to run an emulation
of another computer. It can be done, but the performance is awful.
Scientologists are trying to run a bad copy of LRH.

- Keith Henson, from alt.religion.scientology
.