Re: ASCII, Postscript or PDF in IETF drafts

[tkuiper at tobit.com]

uh oh, please not, PS is a really nice abstract format while
PDF is sortof compiled in diffrent versions. On the other hand
there are many Postscript printers around and not so much PDF-Printers :-)

Greets,
Thomas

>
>
> At present, RFCs can be supplied in either ASCII only, or in both
> ASCII and Postscript format. However, the PDF format has some
> advantages compared to Postscript:
>
> (1) Much much smaller files
>
> (2) More platform-independent
>
> Both Postscript and PDF are formats controlled by a commercial
> company, ADOBE. There are products which can produce and read these
> formats from multiple manufacturers. However, products to print PDF
> seem to be mostly from ADOBE. The reason for this is that ADOBE
> provides free PDF print programs of good quality, so there is no
> commercial market for selling PDF print programs.
>
> A few years ago, there were many competing formats to PDF. Now,
> however, PDF seems to be totally dominating the market for exchange
> of formatted documents in layout format. As other manufacturers
> than ADOBE are using PDF, it has become a de facto standard in
> the same way as Postscript.
>
> I suggest that PDF replaces Postscript as the secondary RFC format.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Jacob Palme <jpalme at dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
> for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme