"Code Sandwiches"

[Walter Bright]

On 3/9/2011 10:18 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> They're text. With minor formatting. That alone makes html better. Html is
> lousy for a lot of things, but formatted text is the one thing it's always
> been perfectly good at. And frankly I think I'd *rather* go with pretty much
> any word processing format if the only other option was pdf.

I used to use HTML for presentations. Frankly, it was terrible. The text was 
rendered badly, especially when blown up on a screen. I could never get it to 
look right. I couldn't email the presentation to anyone without sending a wad of 
other files along with it.

I switched to pdf presentations, and they worked great and looked great. The pdf 
viewers would render text that looked great blown up. The pdf was all in one 
file, meaning I could email it to someone and they could look at it directly 
from their mail program. I would bring backups on a thumb drive so in case my 
laptop was busted/stolen by the TSA, I could run my presentation on anyone's 
computer.

I do not understand why HTML engines do such an ugly job rendering text, while 
PDF's on the same machine do a great job. This is true on Windows as well as Ubuntu.