DjVu (was: cross-platform font issue)

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

Kossom wrote:

> For what its worth, I can't read the PDFs that John posted.

Nit:  Not "posted".  Put on web site.  Not the same.

Main point:  I'm grossed out.  PDF allegedly stands for
Portable Document Format.  If it's not portable, what
good is it????  See below for something better.

> The text was
> rendered as a graphic and the resolution isn 't high enough

Not likely.  I wanted it to look nice, so I rendered it
at high resolution.

> or something in the encoding went wrong.

What encoding?  It's just a bitmap.  If PDF can't encode
a bitmap, what can it do?????  The PDF looks fine on all
my machines.  Something is rotten somewhere.

> Theoretically, this should all go away when using the
> latest iteration of the new international 65K character
> fonts called Unicode

Theoretically, yeah -- we just have to wait until everybody
in the intended audience is running a Unicode-capable browser.
Purgatory will have frozen over several times by then.

=================================

I decided to light a candle rather than just cursing the
PDF.  I rendered a couple of the documents in DjVu format:
  http://www.monmouth.com/~jsd/physics/degeneracy.djvu
  http://www.monmouth.com/~jsd/physics/rapidity.djvu

You will have to download the viewer plugin for your
browser.  It's free.  Go to
  http://www.lizardtech.com/download/
and click on
  Win - Mac - Solaris - MacX - Linux
as appropriate.

Note that DjVu is a really wonderful thing.  For example,
rapidity.djvu is about 1/4th the size of rapidity.pdf,
yet has vastly greater image quality.  Hit Ctrl-3 to
zoom in and see the quality.  And/or hold the Ctrl key
to use the mouse as a magnifying glass.

If you're running Linux, Irix, or Solaris, the compressor
and associated utilities (not just the viewer) are available
for free.  That includes source code (not just executables).
  http://djvu.sourceforge.net/

For Monoposoft platforms, the viewer plugin is free, but
you have to pay for the compressor.

For more info on what DjVu is and what it's good for, see
  http://www.djvuzone.org/