John Culleton wrote: > 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 ! > > 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. :) You should have tried it on CP/M ! > 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. At least you write 'procedure options recursive' ! > 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? Try it ? How much do you need to loose ? Cheers, J/. -- John Beardmore, MSc EDM (Open), B.A. Chem (Oxon), CMIOSH, AIEMA, MEI Managing Director, T4 Sustainability Limited. http://www.T4sLtd.co.uk/ Energy Audit, Carbon Management, Design Advice, Sustainable Energy Consultancy and Installation, Carbon Trust Standard Registered Assessor Phone: 0845 4561332 Mobile: 07785 563116 Skype: t4sustainability
