RE: Rick's PDF files message - Involving people without a computer

[patricia bonner <bonner.patricia@epa.gov>]

Rich Puchalsky message noted: Those files would not be 3-4 Mb in size if they weren't saved in the Adobe Acrobat PDF format. I complained about EPA's use of this format at length in the prior discussion in this series on libraries... the prior discusson had some comments by an EPA employee who explained how PDF documents should be created in order to minimize their size."

Here is that message in case some of you would like to know. 

pat

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               The Portable Document Format

     Archived: Thu, 21 Sep 15:10 
     Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 13:18:35 -0400 (EDT) 
     From: John Lord

Subject: The Portable Document Format


I would like to put in a good word for the PDF file format (Adobe's portable document format), since some respondents have criticized EPA's use of it. While it is certainly helpful to provide data in a choice of formats (such as MS Word .doc file and PDF), it is not possible to preserve in a Word document all the information that is present in a well-designed publication. On the simplest level, graphic elements (like graphs) are sometimes hopelessly mangled in the Word version. In a PDF file the utility of the index is always preserved, since pages are separately defined, while in a Word file this is so only if the author has inserted hard page breaks. If the person distilling the PDF has set permissions to forbid changes, what you get is what the author wrote, whereas with a .doc file you don't know who or how it may have been altered on its way to you. And there are many, many other advantages.

If one must have a .doc file, it is possible to convert a PDF file to Word by selecting the text and pasting it into Word, if this was not forbidden when the PDF was distilled, which hopefully EPA does not.

In regard to searching, a properly prepared PDF file _is_ searchable, both from within the free Acrobat Reader program and as one of a collection of files on a hard drive, by the current generation of file indexing utilities.

Lastly, the PDF format is an open standard; MS Word's is not.