Subject: Adobe Acrobat format for documentation

From: "Frederic Taugwalder" <taugwald at cco.caltech.edu>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 10:52:34 -0800

Would it be possible to be able to retrieve the FITS documentation in Adobe
Acrobat format in the near future ?
As a user, I find this multiplatform format the more reliable for document
exchange. It's not so simple from an Windows NT machine to retrieve and
print them in postscript format.

Fred

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From: thompson at orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov (William Thompson)
Date: 22 Sep 1997 18:17:22 GMT

Lucio Chiappetti <lucio at ifctr.mi.cnr.it> writes:

>On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, Frederic Taugwalder wrote:

>  Please don't.
>  Or at least continue to supply good old Postscript as well.

I think that supplying the FITS documentation would be very helpful to users,
since for many platforms the PDF viewers are more capable than PostScript
viewers, and since the PDF files are smaller than the PostScript files.
However, I would agree with the statement that the PDF files should augment
rather than supplant the PostScript files--not everyone has a PDF viewer, and
there are still platforms that Adobe Acrobat does not run on.

William Thompson

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From: tim at lothar.as.arizona.edu (Tim Pickering)
Date: 23 Sep 1997 07:47:15 GMT

>there are still platforms that Adobe Acrobat does not run on.

adobe acrobat is not a necessary prerequisite for viewing PDF files.
recent versions (>4.00) of aladdin ghostscript can understand PDF as
well as postscript. the latest version can be found at
ftp.cs.wisc.edu:/ghost/aladdin. i know that recent versions of (>3)
ghostview fully support these PDF capabilities and i think that for
unix machines ghostview 3 or newer is far superior to acroread as a
PDF reader.  

tim

-- 
  Time is like fingers
Gesturing for me to stop      --- A Quake Haiku
   Why is the sun up?

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From: thompson at orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov (William Thompson)
Date: 23 Sep 1997 15:26:37 GMT

>unix machines ghostview 3 or newer is far superior to acroread as a

Thank you.  I'm in the process of building the lastest version of Ghostscript
now.  (It doesn't appear to be for the fainthearted.)  I've used xpdf myself in
the past, which is fairly primitive.  I've also recently installed acroread on
those machines which are running Digital Unix (OSF/v4) although it doesn't run
on our OSF/v3 machines.  It seems that there are PDF files that acroread can
handle which xpdf cannot.

I still stand by my opinion, which I hope you share, that supplying the
documentation in PDF format is a good idea, but that they should also continue
to be supplied in PostScript format.

Bill Thompson

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From: sla at ucolick.borg (Steve Allen)
Date: 23 Sep 1997 09:22:46 -0700

In article <slrn62et5j.m6.tim at lothar.as.arizona.edu>,
>adobe acrobat is not a necessary prerequisite for viewing PDF files.

I concur that ghostview/ghostscript make a better viewer than the one
from Adobe, but it is admittedly a matter of taste.

I offer that it is only by virtue of the facts that PostScript and PDF
are openly published standards and that viewers are available from
more than one source which make them acceptable as formats for
distributing FITS information.

--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.borg     Voice: +1 408 459 3046     FAX (don't): +1 408 454 9863
WWW: http://www.ucolick.borg/~sla               PGP public keys:  see WWW
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-- 
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.borg     Voice: +1 408 459 3046     FAX (don't): +1 408 454 9863
WWW: http://www.ucolick.borg/~sla               PGP public keys:  see WWW
Junk mail is irrelevant -- my return address has been assimilated.

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From: tim at lothar.as.arizona.edu (Tim Pickering)
Date: 24 Sep 1997 05:42:36 GMT

>from Adobe, but it is admittedly a matter of taste.

acroread for win95/nt is pretty decent, but i find acroread for
solaris and linux really painful to use. it's really slow to redraw
(especially with font smoothing on) even on ultras and P6's whereas gv
is fine on a 486. but i digress...

>distributing FITS information.

agreed. PDF is nice, but is not yet as firmly established as
postscript so it's too early to switch over to it entirely. 

tim

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From: Lucio Chiappetti <lucio at ifctr.mi.cnr.it>
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 11:29:07 +0200

Please don't.
  Or at least continue to supply good old Postscript as well.
  I would not encourage this proliferation of formats.

> print them in postscript format.

  As a Unix user, I definitely prefer Postscript, which I can lpr directly,
  and preview with a previewer bundled with my OS, without the need of
  installing a new viewer every other day.
  (BTW, our institute's NT server has a Ghostview previewer installed, I
  do not know if it came bundled or was installed by the administrator).

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From: Clive Page <cgp at nospam.le.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Sep 1997 13:15:40 +0100

In article <608n3d$qjb at post.gsfc.nasa.gov>,
>to be supplied in PostScript format.

I'm afraid that I agree with Lucio Chiapetti and others who don't like
Adobe Acrobat.  I get an increasing number of documents in this format and
find them a real pain.  On our Unix systems here we now have to keep two
different versions of the Acroread program, because some .PDF files can be
read on one and not the other, and vice-versa, and I also find that some
documents can be read on my screen but not printed out.   Presumably there
is some non-upwards-compatibility in the Acrobat format, but I have no
idea what it is and no idea in advance which incoming files require which
version of the reader.   

As far as I know, the Acrobat format is proprietary and non-published.  I
very much hope that astronomers will stick to using formats which are easy
to use and in the public domain, even if this means the files are a little
larger.

-- 
-- 
Clive Page,
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,        
University of Leicester.

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From: sla at ucolick.borg (Steve Allen)
Date: 24 Sep 1997 10:17:46 -0700

In article <60b09c$efo at owl.le.ac.uk>, Clive Page  <cgp at nospam.le.ac.uk> wrote:
>As far as I know, the Acrobat format is proprietary and non-published.

No.  PDF is openly documented, else Peter Deutsch would have
difficulty implementing it in ghostscript.

See the Addison-Wesley page at
http://www.aw.com/devpress/series/adobe.html

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From: Lucio Chiappetti <lucio at ifctr.mi.cnr.it>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 16:16:53 +0200

I enclose some results of a query to comp.lang.postscript I had a while ago
(we were considering use of pdf vs postscript for documentation within a
multi-institute project. We ended up sticking to ms-word and postscript)

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From: seaman at noao.edu (Rob Seaman)
Date: 25 Sep 1997 18:52:45 GMT

> multi-institute project. We ended up sticking to ms-word and postscript)

[various comments from various people - it wasn't always obvious who]

>> One can use Ghostscript to convert Postscript to PDF, but the quality
>> of the resulting PDF file is not great.Or one can buy Adobe Acrobat
>> (or Exchange or whatever the correct name is - sorry I don't recall,
>> nor do I really care) for (if my memory serves me) $295.

In the U.S., educational pricing for the Adobe package (for the Mac/PC
anyway) is around $40.  They've also released their OCR update - this
supports converting a PostScript bitmap back into ascii, for instance.

The various Adobe PDF tools do offer very good control over fonts and
embedded graphics, that your typical word processing package won't.
It's also easy to print to a PDF pseudo-printer from any application
that would support a PostScript printer.

>> On the other hand, anybody can read/print/write Postscript, as there's
>> lots of freely available software to do so plus many printers on the
>> market can print Postscript files directly - user just needs to send
>> that file to the printer, and - unlike PDF - it will end up on the paper.

Well, this is ideally true, but there are plenty of PostScript files out
there that are not straightforward to print - typically due to missing
fonts or a missing platform dependent preamble.  A growing niche in the
graphics community is for "pre-flight" software to verify that a
particular print job will complete as intended.

Also, capable PostScript viewers are still not really very widespread.

>> The Acrobat viewer can convert PDF file to Postscript and spool
>> it to the printer. Now - if your printer understands Postscript,
>> all good and well. Otherwise - you guessed it.

I've had no problem printing to a non-PostScript Mac inkjet from Acrobat.

It seems silly to cast this as a PostScript versus PDF argument, since
the same company (Adobe) developed both.  Suitably crafted PostScript
is preferable for printing.  PDF is preferable for viewing - nobody has
mentioned the embedded links and other indexing options, for instance.
Changing display resolutions seems quick and simple with Acrobat, but
not with the PostScript viewers I've seen.

Acrobat also is available as a web browser plug-in.  The real debate
should be PDF versus html for online documentation.

Rob
-- 
seaman at noao.edu, http://iraf.noao.edu/~seaman
NOAO, 950 N Cherry Ave, Tucson AZ 85719, 520-318-8248
PGP: 98 8D 8B 49 74 9A 41 88  3A 43 87 54 51 BF 30 4B

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From: tim at lothar.as.arizona.edu (Tim Pickering)
Date: 24 Sep 1997 05:42:36 GMT

tim

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From: thompson at orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov (William Thompson)
Date: 30 Sep 1997 16:25:53 GMT

>>to be supplied in PostScript format.

One suggestion made was to use ghostview to view PDF files.  Does anybody know
how to build the latest version of ghostscript under OSF/v3.6?  Adobe finally
got around to supporting acroread on DEC Alphas, but only under later versions
of OSF.  It would also be nice to have a more recent version of ghostview.  The
problem is compiling the package libpng.

William Thompson