Changes http://page.axiom-developer.org/zope/mathaction/210PamphletSupportOnMathAction/diff -- On 7 Oct 2005 at 14:15, C Y wrote:
> I must be misunderstanding something - AFAIK pdf isn't proprietary. > It's fully documented, and there is no restriction on creating either > viewers or generaters for it. In what sense it is more or less > proprietary than postscript or dvi or mathml? The pdf format is proprietary _and_ fully documented - as is the Word format. And what Microsoft did, Adobe can do it : that is, he can decide some day to change the pdf format in a way incompatible with previous versions (as MS did for Word - to enhance performances, or increase his income or whatever reason), users cannot do anything against that. And if the modifications are not strictly upward compatible with preceding ones, some formulas included in scientific articles could become inexact, without the author being aware of it, and without the reader being able to notice it :for texts, the reader can easily detect and correct errors while reading, but this is impossible for formulas, in general.This could be as catastrophic for science as the burning of Alexandria's library. Unfortunately, many scientists are not aware of this problem with pdf. Even among TeX developers, many promote replacing dvi by pdf. Pdf is acceptable for short-life documents, but not (IMHO) for scientific documents : only exactness certified over very long periods of time ought to be taken into consideration for science. It does not seem reasonable to rely on proprietary formats such as Word or pdf and cross one's fingers, hoping they won't do something wrong. Because some day, they will :-( The most critical community against pdf lately were not scientists but lawyers, because of Enron and other affairs, that generated "tons" of electronic documents, and they fear that these documents could become unreadable in the long term. The problem of defining an A-pdf format (Archival-pdf) was resurrected on this occasion. For scientists, I think it would be important that everybody realize the problem, before our libraries of pdf documents "burn". The dvi format is completely safe because it is frozen and very simple, and is very well suited because it has been devised for science. Best wishes, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.univ-orleans.fr/EXT/ASTEX ftp://ftp.univ-orleans.fr/pub/tex/PC/AsTeX liste de discussion: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Abonnement � la liste: envoyer un message de contenu "sub astex Nom Prenom Etablissement" � [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- forwarded from http://page.axiom-developer.org/zope/mathaction/[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
