Re: ASCII, Postscript or PDF in IETF drafts

[Lloyd Wood <L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, Jacob Palme wrote:

> 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

not always true; spend more time converting latex dvi to pdf. (oh, and
on-screen rendering of Knuth's assuming-heavy-bleed fonts in Acrobat
is extremely unreadably poor.) A pdf conversion of well-written
postscript is likely to be larger; it's just that most programs can't
write decent postscript.

However, a primary advantage of pdf up to version 3.0 is that it's
less code, more data in known formats (albeit with patent problems.)
You're much less likely to see interpreter errors. The standard
workaround for recalcitrant postscript that you can't print or view is
to distill to pdf, simply because distill has a good postscript
interpreter - and it can be made to handle US letter/A4 conversions
reasonably well. (converting from complete postscript is better than
printing to pdf; handles eps inclusions better.)

Note mentions in risks digest of lossiness in pdf displaying/printing.


> (2) More platform-independent

Please evaluate the Windows-only-so-far Acrobat pdf 4.0, with added
forms and Javascript(!) before making that claim. It's a major step
backwards from 2.1/3.0.

(Javascript is about as platform-independent as BASIC, but rather less
 robust. I get a stream of javascript errors just accessing the
 homepage of the originator of the language with a Netscape browser:
 http://people.netscape.com/brendan/
 and viewing this homepage tells you a lot about Javascript.)

Additionally, are you proposing the binary or text pdf format as
convention?

> Both Postscript and PDF are formats controlled by a commercial 
> company, ADOBE.

pdf is still controlled; with the increase in third-party postscript
interpreters (Aladdin etc) you have to wonder how much Adobe controls
the postscript format. Note extremely wide takeup of postscript levels
2 and 3.


> 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.

You have to pay for the distiller/exchange programs (the node-locked
unix distill version is quite cheap, however.)


> 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. 

I was under the impression that that was Microsoft Office.

> As other manufacturers
> than ADOBE are using PDF, it has become a de facto standard in
> the same way as Postscript.

Same argument for Microsoft Office. Same version problems too, come to
think of it.

> I suggest that PDF replaces Postscript as the secondary RFC format.

When knowledgeable and equipped readers can convert the postscript to
pdf themselves? What's the point, exactly?

L.

the IETF didn't standardise postscript. Or ASCII. Or nroff/troff.
That's a better argument for writing RFCs in HTML.

<L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>