On Sun, 21 Oct 2001, Glenn McCorkle wrote: > Is 'this' EXACTLY what Joerg intended for me to see? > http://www.angelfire.com/id/glenndoom/test-pdf.gif > It 'is' what I saw when I decoded test.pdf
Glenn, you're falling back into the mindset of pdf as a graphics format. It simply isn't. Portable DOCUMENT format is a method whereby the PRINTED document is the whole point of the thing. The renderings on the computer screen are merely previews or approximations of what the finished product will actually look like. > Since no 2 PDF viewer programs are "exactly" the same.... > > PDFs will be displayed differently by each one being used. > (just as HTML files are displayed differently by each browser) As an "interpreted" language, pdf will still have *some* minor variations from system to system, yes, but you'll never get the wild variations of html browsers. Do this as an experiement. Print out western.pdf from whatever different tools you have that can do so. (I used Acroreader 4.0 and xpdf-0.91-1.6x) The resulting documents aren't "identical" but they are close enough that you have to look twice to see the differences. Perhaps one pdf tool will use a built-in version of the Helvetica font while another might use the system version of the font, but when the documents are printed out, everything will be aligned as it's supposed to be. You won't have one pdf tool supporting javascript or tables falling off the edge of the page. You won't have the wildly different renderings possible when one browser supports CSS and another doesn't. If you want a graphic to render somewhat correctly on someone else's monitor, use a graphics format, but if you want a document to print out right on his printer, use a document format... pdf, ps, eps, or whatever. Comparing graphics formats to document formats is still apples and oranges. - Steve
