[10446] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Re: increasing use of the .PDF format
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Graham, RUL)
Tue Jul 23 20:54:14 1996
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 18:52:37 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Peter Graham, RUL" <psgraham@rci.rutgers.edu>
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 23 Jul 1996 17:15:52 +1100
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
Reply-To: "Peter Graham, RUL" <psgraham@rci.rutgers.edu>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
From: Peter Graham, Rutgers University Libraries
I have to respond to Grant White and the Newcastle, Australia trainers,
especially to someone who quotes a Seamus Heaney poem I'd
just read the night before:
"......and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it."
Lightenings VIII
Which may even stand for a metaphor in the current state of the discussion.
I don't want to spend much time defending PDF per se; as I said earlier, it
is "one (less than perfect) tool in a battery of developing tools", and I'm
prepared to admit that it presents problems.
But Grant White suggests that it is an "obstructive mechanism" and then turns
for his solution to HTML. I think there are two flaws here. First, any
advance on the ascii character set will introduce standards, implementations
and new mechanisms that might seem obstructive. Consider even HTML, for
example; I remember trying to figure out the WWW before a graphical browser
came along, and gave up. Without a suitable browser HTML is of no use; is it
not then an "obstructive mechanism"?
Second, HTML is a very imperfect tool that provides only some of the needs I
spoke of: it is a publication medium that doesn't allow control of the form
of publication. For effective searching in other than a very simpleminded
cleartext environment, HTML is simply a subset of much more powerful SGML
potentialities (and discussions are apparently under way to get TEI-like
headings insertable into HTML--another "obstructive mechanism"?). For
control of presentation format PDF allows one means; it also allows
protection of content.
Grant and the Newcastle trainers appear to me to be taking a short view, i.e.
how best to help people right now (not the worst approach in the
world! -- considering how few places even try to do that).
The dynamic of the network is that we
constantly have to be looking ahead to next year and the year after. The
Newcastle view appears to argue for stasis; is that where they want to
be in a couple of years (pretending that the marvellous remains here
on the ground, not in that ship in the air, to refer back to the Heaney poem)?
--pg
NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS: psgraham@rci.rutgers.edu Peter Graham
Rutgers University Libraries <URL:http://aultnis.rutgers.edu/pghome.html>
169 College Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08903 (908)445-5908; fax (908)445-5888
