On 3 Mar 2005 at 14:34, Robert Patterson wrote: > For me the final product is the PDF and/or the hard copy. The hard > copy is certainly isolated from abusive copy protection or corporate > bankruptcy, but it is vulnerable to fire and flood and the like, as > well as toner breakdown and paper rot. At this point I am counting on > the ubiquity of PDF to isolate it from anything its parent, Adobe, may > throw at it. While this hope may be misplaced, I think it has good > odds, and it is the most reliable practical digital archiving format I > can see at the moment.
Bitmaps ought to be an even better digital archiving format, as they are so simple in the way they encode data that it is very easy (relatively speaking, especially compared to something like Acrobat Reader) to write a program to display and print them. I would think of them as digital photocopies. However, as long as Acrobat Reader *is* widely available, PDFs are certainly easier to deal with, as they can hold multiple pages in a single file (something that wouldn't be very convenient in a bitmap format). But if you're truly looking for a viable long-term digital storage format, I'd recommend the bitmaps over PDFs (and then keep both). -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
