[ot] Re: D hidden features topic for StackOverflow

[Nick Sabalausky]

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

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).

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.

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.