On Monday 27 July 2009 09:13:53 pm John Beardmore wrote: > John Culleton wrote: > > I wept a little. You see I am still a COBOL programmer at > > heart, and she was Grandma COBOL. > > Hmmm... I had a brief infatuation with COBOL in 1984 but if > we're talking medieval languages I much preferred PL/1, and would > probably have got on just fine with Algol 68. > > Never mind... In 1984 we were told that we couldn't use PL/1 > because at 500k the library was too big to fit on disk. In 1988 > we had microsoft C which came on about 20 floppies. Bummer ! > > > Cheers, J/. PL/I was a conglomeration of COBOL concepts and FORTRAN concepts. As a result it generated bulky code, and in an era when a big mainframe had 1.5 megabytes of main memory that was a killer. Even IBM couldn't sell it. Not enough people used it for the IBM System Egineers to get up to speed on it so you were more or less on your own. COBOL yet lives, and P:L/I is just a memory.
While I am at it, I have a file size question. I have a publisher who limits e-books to 3MB. The rationale is that some purchasers are still on dial-up. Scribus is notorious for generating great big pdf's, so much so that I did my e-book referenced below in pdftex which is pretty economical. Given e.g., a pdf 1.4 or 1.5 file created by Scribus, with lots of png screen shots and the like, what is the accepted wisdom for shrinking the file while retaining the content? Thus far I have thought of loading the pdf into Acrobat Reader, printing to file, and then doing a ps2pdf on that file but that might make things bigger. Any thoughts? -- John Culleton Create Book Covers with Scribus/e-book $5.95 http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html
