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Re: The HTML Experiment



Leigh,
Yes, PDF format is becoming more popular but the physics community
still lives and dies by the huge postscript file. I have problems viewing
these files through Acrobat Exchange. I actually save them to disk and
then use Ghostview.

I use the preprint archive at xxx.lanl.gov. I've set up my browser
with the appropriate cookie to bring in .pdf documents directly to
my Macintosh and fire up Adobe Acrobat Exchange, all transparently,
and with the correct kind of fonts for the Macintosh already
specified. If that's not where the physics community is, I can't
imagine what it must be like (very crowded?) in the community.

Adobe Acrobat Exchange for the Macintosh includes Acrobat Distiller,
a utility which translates the principal dialects of Postscript to
..pdf (with considerable reduction in size). I used to use the Mac
version of Ghostscript but it was very unreliable; Distiller works
much better, though it still fails occasionally on the more exotic
dialects of Postscript.

I have tried Eudora but don't like it so much. I am
thinking to moving to Netscape Mail because that is what many of my
collaborators use. In fact, they love to send attachments that are Excel,
Project, or some other Microsft program file and Netscape seems to handle
them very well (if you also have that software).

I use Eudora Light (which is free). It handles all attachments
completely transparently, including those you mentioned and .pdf.
When one opens one's mail using Eudora Light an icon representing
the attachment appears in the window with the text. The attached
document may then be opened (assuming you also have the correct
application on your machine) by simply double clicking the icon
in the text window.

Netscape mail may also be the way to go now that the Math Markup
Language is due out shortly (I can provide an URL to those interested).
That will enable a set standard for equations to be posted to web pages or
sent with html mails. Hopefully it will also eliminate all those damn
gifs when one uses latex2html. (However, you can get around that by using
a different conversion program.) It will also hopefully eliminate the
clumsy (if you don't know it) Latex as editor of choice also for most of
the journals.

I know someone who writes her personal correspondence in LaTeX;
there's no accounting for taste. Math Markup Language will still
not accommodate illustrations seamlessly; .pdf does. As long as
diagrams are useful (and I think that much of the physics
community still uses diagrams) Math Markup Language will only go
part way to being complete.

Leigh