[ot] Re: D hidden features topic for StackOverflow

[BCS]

Reply to Nick,

> "BCS" <ao at pathlink.com> wrote in message
> news:78ccfa2d3290a8caebd75c21451a at news.digitalmars.com...
> 
>> Reply to Nick,
>> 
>>> - Using PDF instead of HTML for anything except printing.
>>> 
>> I'll grant you everything but the thing about PDFs. PDF's are good as
>> stand alone long docs or anything where layout is important.
>> 
> Ehh, I truely hate PDFs (except for highly accurate printing, of
> course). Anything that can't be read on a screen without a bunch of
> zooming and 2D-scrolling is just not suitable for being read on a
> screen.

I'd go the other way, PDF's are suitable for anything you'd like in hardcopy 
but are to cheap to actually print off.

> And that describes the vast majority of PDF's I've seen (For
> example, a common occurrence is a single page with multiple columns of
> text where the text is too small to be readable zoomed-out, but if you
> zoom in, then every time you finish reading a column you have to
> scroll *up* to the top of the page and then over to the right - which
> is just a really stupid thing to have to do).

OK so you can make a crappy layout, same goes for HTML.

> Plus, vertical page
> margins really have no business being in a screen-viewed document
> either.
>

OK point to you
 
> XHTML/CSS (despite it's flaws) is far better suited for screen-viewed
> layouts since, unlike PDF, it doesn't force the reader to use
> navigation that's, by comparison, incredibly awkward just for the sake
> of preserving the locations of linebreaks within a paragraph, which
> frankly is *rarely* important outside of printing (also true of any
> other detail where PDF provides more accuracy).
> 

PDF does zoom better than HTML. With web pages, you as often as not get the 
tiny font wrapped to 1/2 the width of the screen or lines that are about 
a paragraph wide. With PDF you can zoom in without things going woonky.

> I might be mistaken, but I don't think editing a PDF can't really be
> done with typical text editing / word processing software. You need to
> either use the expensive Adobe Acrobat (full version), or some obscure
> 3rd party program from an obscure developer. Not that editing a PDF is
> needed nearly as commonly as reading one, but it is a problem that has
> bitten me more than once.

I've maybe once wanted to edit a PDF. (HTML for things people might want 
to edit, docs and other book like things... Nope)

> 
> Plus, the format itself is a bit of a kitchen-sink design. It's
> impossible for a program to fully support PDF loading without also
> supporting damn near every file format under the sun. And for
> something that's primarily a page layout format, I really see no
> reason for the added complexity that such flexibility entails.
> 

Host Adobe and you don't need to bother.