Question about PDF manipulation

[Tony Duell]

> 
> Some of the attitudes here about PDF impress me as about the most ludditical
> (is there such a word?) as I've seen in a long time.

I dislike the PDF format, probably always will. For a long time I 
couldn't read it at all, in fact none of my machines can now. My parents 
have an old Mac that than display most PDF files (if I can get them onto 
the machine, which is non-trivial), or I look in the local internet cafe, 
which is not convenient either

> 
> Suppose you have a CompuPro memory card and no manual.  The card is useless.
> I give you the PDF file of the manual.  You can look at the manual
> on-screen, or you can print it and you HAVE the hard copy manual.  In color,

Well, it takes me 5 minutes per page to print it (most of the time is 
transfering the bitmap to the printer over localtalk). For any reasonable 
manual, it'll probably take at least a day to print it. 

And in that time I could probably have worked out how to use a memory 
card. It can't be that complicated. I have the S100 pinout to hand. I 
have pinouts of all common ICs to hand. I could trace out enough of the 
schematic in a day to know how to set the addressing jumpers, etc.

> where the original was in color, and with quality that may be

Assuming you have a colour printer...

> indistinguishable from (or in some cases actually better than) the original
> manual when it was new.
> 
> Is that a benefit?  Is it better than no manual at all?  Is it, essentially,
> as good as being able to call CompuPro (which no longer exists) and order a
> new manual, FOR FREE, and have it delivered INSTANTLY?

It's not free (download time, paper, tone). It's certainly not instant. 

> 
> So what if it's not "searchable".  Get a clue:  THE ORIGINAL PAPER MANUAL
> WAS NOT "SEARCHABLE".  But if you or anyone else wants it to be searchable

I find it a lot quicker to flip through a paper manual and spot the 
schematics, listings, link-setting tables, etc than to look at anything 
on-screen. It takes a good few seconds for a page to display on any 
computer that I've ever used. I can flip through a manual a lot quicker 
than that.



> The people who don't like PDFs either have not used Acrobat extensively or
> don't understand the real nature of the prouduct.  Acrobat allows you to
> create an electronic document that can have as many features (or as few) as
> the creator wants:

Most of which are not directly applicable to a container of scanned 
imaged. Or at least can't be automatically created for such a set of 
scanned images.

> And it and the documents it creates are multi-platform:  PC, Apple, Linux,
> Sun, IBM mainframe .... virtually every computer platform in existence.

Just not any of the 200-or-so machines that I own. Period.

-tony