[music-dsp] On PDF - a plea to Academia

[Russell Borogove]

Ben Nevile wrote:
> > I'll grant that HTML sucks for trying to set
> > mathematical formulae and the like, but is there any
> > other reason not to use it in these days of ubiquitious
> > web browsers?
> 
> because display characteristics can be modified by the user in the 
> browser, HTML does not guarantee that your work will look the same 
> every time someone looks at it.

My assertion is that this shouldn't be a big detriment 
for technical/academic/"non-artistic" writing, and can 
actually be a huge _benefit_, in that you aren't forcing 
a portrait-aspect document into a landscape-aspect 
display window, or trying to print an A4 document on US 
letter paper, or vice versa. 

> I don't know what version of Adobe Acrobat you are using or why it is 
> so unlikeable - I have had consistent success with PDF files on macs, 
> unix machines, and billboxes alike.  You could always use a different 
> PDF viewer, I know there are a bunch of them.

Acrobat 5.0 to 5.1 browser plugin on WinME/IE6. It 
displays some pages blank that it's not supposed to, it 
takes a long time to display some pages, it hangs and 
crashes the browser. One or more of these occurs on nearly 
every nontrivial PDF document I look at. Maybe I should be 
downloading these pages and viewing them locally instead 
of inline in the browser. 

I suspect ME is the problem, as it's not one of the more 
popular incarnations of W9x, but it still seems mainstream 
enough that Adobe should either get it to work or not install
the plugin by default. I'll try looking for another PDF 
viewer. 

-RB


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