On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Ira Abramov wrote:

> Quoting Muli Ben-Yehuda, from the post of Wed, 26 Feb:
> >
> > > Seriously, while PDF is not a panacea for many Windows kiddies who only
> > > know of Word, it is still much more accesible than PostScript. Sending a
> > > document to a Windows guy in PS format is like sending a document to a
> > > UNIX guy in Word format. Not a nice thing to do.
>
> why do you even compare the two? PDF is a presentation format, Word is
> editable, scriptable source, for starters.
>

I compared the two because PostScript is not standard on Windows system,
and Word is not standard on UNIX systems. You are right that they are very
different in concept.

> Both are proprietary though (Ask Sklyarov).
>

Skylarov was arrested for circumventing the Adobe eBook format, which is a
proprietary and undocumented way of scrambling a PDF. Otherwise, PDF is
fully documented, and a full documentation for it is available on the
Adobe site. Whether it makes it proprietary or not, is left for the
interpretation of the beholder.



> > I disagree. Unless PDF comes by default on windows nowday, installing
> > a postscript viewer should be no more and no less complicated than
> > installing a PDF viewer.
>
> well, due to a very good marketing campaign, many people recognize the
> .pdf extension, almost as many as those who recognize .html. however .ps
> is rarely recognized outside the Unix/Mac user domain. It may be easy to
> install, if people knew about it.
>

Agreed

> And shlofmi said:
> > > [1] http://www.fefe.de/nowindows/
> > Interesting link, which I completely don't agree with.If I can get
> > the software I write to run on Windows and other non-UNIX platforms
> > without too much overhead, I will try to do so.While the latest
> > version of Quad-Pres can only run on UNIX (partly becauseI'm using
> > WML), I believe all my other software is compatible with Windows.
>
> I Agree in full.
> Felix has a twisted view on what software freedom is (it seems like a
> lot of his page is full of DJB's stuff. While I agree it's great
> software, it's not free, and I ache for a GPL replacement)
>
> Asking for people not to port software to windows is rediculous. I see
> the idea of porting Free Software everywhere as the best thing to do.
> you flood windows users with a Free environment, they will get used to
> it, and finally switching the kernel will not be fealt. BillG will call
> us Viral for saying that, but it's the Utopia I dream of :)
>

Agreed again.

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

> --
> Big fish in a small pond
> Ira Abramov
>
> http://ira.abramov.org/email/ This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13.
> Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
>



----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/

There's no point in keeping an idea to yourself since there's a 10 to 1
chance that somebody already has it and will share it before you.


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