Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT strips 4301-4305 (6th July to 10 July 2020)

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Gyrre:

--- Quote from: BenRG on 08 Jul 2020, 23:32 ---Am I the only one here who quite happily uses PDFs for his employer's official documents and scans and has no problem with the format at all?

Anyway, it figures that Dr John would insist on using 'proven technology'... Including putting paper hard copy in a re-entry capsule that was designed to cook a pizza during its flight. I don't know how hot you have to make an oven to cook a pizza during the five minutes or so of re-entry but I'm sure it's hot enough to make paper anoxically incinerate! It's kind of odd that a man who is a blue sky thinker and a proven innovator feels more comfortable with tools that have been around the block a few times. I suppose when you're living with the Alpha phase of technology pretty much 24/7, you'd feel happier with stuff that you know has had time to be debugged!

--- End quote ---

For me, it's less the format and more the Adobe.

Y:
The ability to print to PDF reduced to need to ever print something, at least for me. And you could pass around something formatted without worrying about macro viruses and passing along identifying information. In universities some professors distributed postscript versions of the coursework, some of which crashed the postscript printer.

I heard some years ago that NASA still use(s/d) Commodore chips in their satellites, and were buying game consoles like the one I had for the chip.

Tova:
I prefer PDFs to the days when people used to pass around (or worse, expect you to create) MS Word documents.

On the other hand, I am very aware that the PDF that some software creates is absolute turd (because I once had a job that involved developing software that rendered them).

BenRG:
For me the greatest annoyance I have with PDFs (apart from the fact that Acrobat Reader is now basically a huge advert for Adobe's premium PDF services) is the difference in performance. Try to convert an .docx to a .pdf and it comes out as a few dozen kB at most. Physically scan it into PDF format and the resulting file is 1-2MB per page. I'm pretty sure that it is something to do with how a scanner reacts to black-on-white text but it makes uploading scanned files to third parties a nightmare.

Tova:
That is because a .docx text document converted to PDF is represented quite compactly as a bunch of text and some commands to select fonts and place it. Whereas a scanned document is an image - maybe an uncompressed one? - with maybe some OCR'd text annotations.

Acrobat Pro (sorry) would probably be able to make it much smaller.

There are probably other programs around that can do something similar.

I should probably point out - sorry again - that compared to Acrobat Pro, Adobe Acrobat Reader does a shit job of rendering PDFs. It's fine for most people's use, but for professional use where you care very much about accurate rendering, it's not at all fine.

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