George makes several important points regarding one of Acrobat's (and probably
PDF's, too) greatest weakness: it doesn't maintain the logical structure of
the text. For example, in a multi-column page, selecting two paragraphs in one
column will also select all of the text on the same parallel. It will also
select text in line art, particularly irritating to me, since I use Acrobat to
maintain electronic copies of documents created on the Mac (I've got an IBM
clone).

Acrobat would be better if it somehow maintained the structure of the document
along with the textness of it (the feature of Acrobat that makes it useful to
me). I am considering maintaining our information in SGML for data management
purposes and printing to Acrobat (let's face it: SGML implementation right now
isn't cost-effective for complex advertising layout).

To stop a long thread on how I don't understand Acrobat: I could be mistaken
on all of these points, and invite any corrections. I do use it in-house, and
am implementing a CD-ROM PDF collection of documents (about 300MB), but I'm
not formatting for it especially.

Also, a reminder to post your addresses in your signatures. Not that I am
advocating fifteen line
bandwidth wasters . . .


E. Forrest Christian My WWW Waste of BW
eforrest@mcs.com http://www.mcs.com/~eforrest/home.html


<---- Begin Included Message ---->

I just thought I'd comment on some issues from a little perspective. I'm
blind and there are a lot of people who cannot read printed documents.
The way this is accomplised is with a speech synthesizer, on screen
magnification or a refreshable braille screen.

<----SNIP!---->

On Wed, 9 Aug 1995, Brian
Vaughn wrote:

> I agree that PDF is not very good for on-screen reading. The New York
Times
> internet edition (TimesFAX) is about the most readable PDF document I've
found
> on the internet.

The Times site is not accessible with adaptive equipment. It is just too
difficult to figure where one item starts and another stops--navigation
is very important !

<----SNIP!----->

SGML and PDF represent two approaches and I believe that the time will
come when these two systems merge. At that point we will have a system
that works for everybody. As information technology develops remember
that there are a lot of people who don't have 20/20 vision.

Best
George