From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Wed Oct 18 2000 - 00:25:59 MDT
Frank Prengel writes:
> Sad, but true. You're right. Which does not justify your sweeping statement that
> this makes the document "useless" (for everyone, that means). But I'd better
No problem, we can as well publish it in a DES-encrypted gzipped
tarball containing EBCDIC-coded XML and Targa 24-bit images. It will
not make it useless, at least not for everyone.
> shut up on this... :)
>
> Am I right in assuming that PDF, too, is a proprietary format? That you have to
It is documented (it's just a subset of PostScript), and can be
generated by a number of commercial and free packages. I don't really
like it being commercial, since subject to economic forces, pushing
for balkanization, but it's a de facto standard. Adobe has so far
behaved nicely, no idea how long it will last.
> buy Acrobat from Adobe to *produce* PDF documents? (Sure, readers are free,
> since the want people to use their format.) Or is there a freeware tool that
> would turn my PPT into PDF?
There are diverse filters, which will produce .pdf, or programs which
allow to export documents as pdf. There are also OpenSource readers
which read .pdf (gv and xpdf -- latter does also contain pdf2txt, very
handy), and GhostView can generate it e.g. via ps2pdf.
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