[Techtalk] Gimp tutorials

Thu Oct 17 23:47:33 UTC 2013

The trouble with pdf, djvu, ps, eps is that they are all paper-oriented, 
instead of screen-oriented. The best way to make a text+graphics 
document suitable for screen display is html. This is because it is 
designed to fit itself optimally to whatever resolution device you have. 
Young kids with excellent eyesight tend to push their machines to the 
highest resolution possible whereas older folks generally use lower 
resolutions. Some people with older, less powerful machines have no 
choice but to use lower resolution displays. And handheld devices are 
overtaking desktops as the most used computers now. A page of sensibly 
designed html will reflow the page to display nicely on all those.

For paper-oriented formats you are stuck with the resolution the author 
demands. If the resolution of your display is lower then you have to not 
only scroll up and down but left and right too, making it easy to miss 
stuff on the page. Add to that, the lock-in because of inability to 
convert information back out, the requirement for a special, often 
bloated, viewer (whereas *everybody* has html viewers), the 
discontinuous paged nature of the display, the peculiar keys and mouse 
movements required for navigation, and the filesize of pdf documents 
being bloated to perhaps ten times the size of their html counterpart.

The most futile aspect is that if dead-tree use is eliminated (as our 
impact on the planet ultimately requires us to do) then those 
inconvenient formats are rendered completely unnecessary because html 
was deliberately designed for electronic displays.

There is also another argument against pdf that has nothing to do with 
technology: Adobe has become (perhaps always was) a nasty corporation. 
It is not healthy to society or the market to help such companies to 
greater strength.

Please don't take this reply as a personal rebuke. It isn't. I 
understand why people accept the use of paper-oriented formats. This is 
how most of our lives operate. It would be exhausting to question 
*everything* all the time. With electronic formats vs paper-formats it 
is very much a matter of being accustomed something. Electronic formats 
are much easier to use, but that weighs very little against the comfort 
of what a person is familiar with.

At one point I used to print everything onto paper, until I realised how 
difficult (and expensive) it made things. Now I hardly use paper at all 
and my life is made much easier because I can get my computer to search 
for what I want, sit in bed and read on a handheld device more 
comfortably than a paperback, and walk the 7 kilometers into town 
happily reading on my handheld device. I can index thousands of 
bookmarks in an organised manner, and carry many thousands of reference 
and fiction books with me in my pocket anywhere I go. I have vast 
amounts of information safely archived on inexpensive external drives, 
yet easily accessible. It would require me to have another house to keep 
all that on paper.

Best wishes,

	- Miriam

A. Mani wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Miriam English <mim at miriam-english.org> wrote:
>> Nooooo! PDF is a terrible format -- useful only for viewing on dead-trees.
>> I've always found the name to be almost Orwellian: the format is the
>> opposite of portable, in that it can't easily be converted back out of pdf
>> again. Even worse, the bloated viewer demands you have a relatively powerful
>> machine and lots of RAM, commonly crashing older machines. In this, the
>> electronic age, I don't understand why so many people still want to print
>> stuff on paper.
>
> The problem with new users is that they may not have a djvu viewer
> (I don't expect anybody to print).
>
> There are images in each of the tutorials.
> So the default strategy should be to avoid leaving the interpretation
> part to the users machine.
>
> The pdf specs does say something about versions suitable for viewing only.
> The main advantage would be the quality of viewable/printable version.
> djvu would be the best alternative ... others may not have viewers.
>
> ps/eps would be definitely better and heavier (though not suitable for
> viewing only).
>
>>
>> I use wget to grab copies of what I want to archive and browse offline. I
>> use a small wrapper script which I call dlsite. This is the heart of it (it
>> should all be on one line, of course):
>
> Thanks, even I use wget on plenty of sites.
> In fact I have a copy of the site.
>
> infinite recursion depth :)
> -p will ensure that login, password ... and such will all be in the
> rendered html.
>
> There are things like http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
>
> I noticed a few issues with firefox :
>
> printing of part of a page as pdf or djvu is not possible
> (with any reasonable plugins as well)
>
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nuke-anything-enhanced/
> permits a weird workaround
>
>
>
>> Best wishes, and hope you can break the paper habit :)
>
> I don't print everything on paper :)
>
>
> Best
>
> A. Mani
>
>
>
> A. Mani
> CU, ASL, AMS, CLC, CMS
> http://www.logicamani.in
>
>

-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
-----
Website: http://miriam-english.org
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