Other Directory Sites: SeekWonder | Directory Owners Forum
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:18:32 ADT
Stephen Dennis (sdennis@svdltd.com)
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 22:44:30 -0700
I said CGM tags instead of SGML tags. I erred.
But, now you are arguing that layout is accomplished in ugly ways. I
never said it was pure or pleasant. My point is that in the way they
have come to be used, their purpose is the same -- the intentions of the
designers be damned.
PDF uses multi-master font technology in which the attributes of the
font are only specified and a font is invented by the reader based on
whatever device the reader is using. HTML uses a series of font names.
HTML could use Panose numbers or some other series of attributes that
specifies a canonical font. It's the same thing. The expression is: a
font kinda like this.
Xerox Pagis takes scanned images and spits out a PDF file. The layout
information in this encoded bitmap is just pixel location. It's the same
thing as if I had scanned in a page and encoded it as a JPG, PNG, or
GIF.
Don't let them fool you. PDF and Postscript are different animals,
otherwise they would have called it Postscript.
On Monday, June 15, 1998 10:26 PM, Perry E. Metzger
[SMTP:perry@piermont.com] wrote:
>
> Stephen Dennis writes:
> > PDF and HTML purposes are closely related...just like the purpose of
> > PostScript and PCL are closely related.
>
> That is simply untrue. HTML is an SGML derived mechanism. It is
> designed to give structure to a document but not to specify layout --
> it is also *not* a mechanism capable of describing vector output. It
> was originally intended to describe the content of the document --
> i.e. "this is a title, this is a paragraph, this is a code example..."
> without in any way constraining the display. The use of grotesque HTML
> kludges to force particular kinds of display, especially by hacking in
> lots of bit map images, has become necessary.
>
> PDF is essentially equivalent in what it can describe, layout-wise, to
> Postscript. As such, what it does is describe how a document is set,
> not what its structuring conventions are. This is an utterly different
> purpose than that which HTML was designed for.
>
> Perry
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:18:32 ADT