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RE: equations, acrobat, WP, other



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.


Sam Held
held@rhip.phys.utk.edu