Re: equations, acrobat, WP, other

[Doug Craigen <dcc@cyberspc.mb.ca>]

Samuel Held wrote:
> Doug,
>         I believe the very fact that not all programs have the perfect
> solution is what leads to so many different protocols being used.
>
> (1) HTML, great because the viewer can understnad it (no plug-in
> required), but complex publications contain many gifs that may not
> download or not print.
>
> (2) PDF, good, because plug-in is free and file sizes are relatively
> small even when uncompressed.  But as you mentioned, hard to view on the
> screen.
>
> (3) Postscript, good because plug-in (ghostview, etc.) are free but file
> sizes can get large.  Compressed postscript (usually gzipped) is better
> and makes files comparable to or smaller than pdf equivalents.  Can be
> read on the screen but printing takes a while because postscripts
> contains information pixel by pixel.  But this is still shorter than pdf
> files of scanned material.
>
> Can you choose?  I use all three depending on what I am doing and where
> I am downloading from.  It's time for a standard.  Just my $0.02.

Standards are in the works, in fact MathML is now official, but it will
take a while before they are well enough supported to be useful.  On the
related front of graphs, diagrams etc, I doubt that MS will adopt
Netscape's graphing extension to html, but probably both will accept
PGML { http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-PGML } when it is approved and
include it in future browser versions.


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Doug Craigen          "Technology with purpose"
                       http://www.dctech.com