Subject: ASCII, Postscript or PDF in IETF drafts

From: Jacob Palme <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 11:23:12 +0200

At present, RFCs can be supplied in either ASCII only, or in both 
ASCII and Postscript format. However, the PDF format has some 
advantages compared to Postscript:

(1) Much much smaller files

(2) More platform-independent

Both Postscript and PDF are formats controlled by a commercial 
company, ADOBE. There are products which can produce and read these 
formats from multiple manufacturers. However, products to print PDF 
seem to be mostly from ADOBE. The reason for this is that ADOBE 
provides free PDF print programs of good quality, so there is no 
commercial market for selling PDF print programs.

A few years ago, there were many competing formats to PDF. Now,
however, PDF seems to be totally dominating the market for exchange
of formatted documents in layout format. As other manufacturers
than ADOBE are using PDF, it has become a de facto standard in
the same way as Postscript.

I suggest that PDF replaces Postscript as the secondary RFC format.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <[email-masked]> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme

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From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:00:54 +0100 (BST)

> (1) Much much smaller files

not always true; spend more time converting latex dvi to pdf. (oh, and
on-screen rendering of Knuth's assuming-heavy-bleed fonts in Acrobat
is extremely unreadably poor.) A pdf conversion of well-written
postscript is likely to be larger; it's just that most programs can't
write decent postscript.

However, a primary advantage of pdf up to version 3.0 is that it's
less code, more data in known formats (albeit with patent problems.)
You're much less likely to see interpreter errors. The standard
workaround for recalcitrant postscript that you can't print or view is
to distill to pdf, simply because distill has a good postscript
interpreter - and it can be made to handle US letter/A4 conversions
reasonably well. (converting from complete postscript is better than
printing to pdf; handles eps inclusions better.)

Note mentions in risks digest of lossiness in pdf displaying/printing.

> (2) More platform-independent

Please evaluate the Windows-only-so-far Acrobat pdf 4.0, with added
forms and Javascript(!) before making that claim. It's a major step
backwards from 2.1/3.0.

(Javascript is about as platform-independent as BASIC, but rather less
 robust. I get a stream of javascript errors just accessing the
 homepage of the originator of the language with a Netscape browser:
 http://people.netscape.com/brendan/
 and viewing this homepage tells you a lot about Javascript.)

Additionally, are you proposing the binary or text pdf format as
convention?

> company, ADOBE.

pdf is still controlled; with the increase in third-party postscript
interpreters (Aladdin etc) you have to wonder how much Adobe controls
the postscript format. Note extremely wide takeup of postscript levels
2 and 3.

> There are products which can produce and read these 

You have to pay for the distiller/exchange programs (the node-locked
unix distill version is quite cheap, however.)

> of formatted documents in layout format. 

I was under the impression that that was Microsoft Office.

> As other manufacturers

Same argument for Microsoft Office. Same version problems too, come to
think of it.

> I suggest that PDF replaces Postscript as the secondary RFC format.

When knowledgeable and equipped readers can convert the postscript to
pdf themselves? What's the point, exactly?

L.

the IETF didn't standardise postscript. Or ASCII. Or nroff/troff.
That's a better argument for writing RFCs in HTML.

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

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From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:00:54 +0100 (BST)

L.

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From: Karl Auerbach <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 09:14:20 -0700 (PDT)

> ASCII and Postscript format....

My own preference is to follow direction pointed out by Marshall Rose in 
"Writing I-Ds and RFCs using XML" RFC2629.

It provides semantic labelling of the parts of the document, thus making
it better material for more next-generation search engines.

Plus it can be readily converted to either raw ascii or HTML and thus has
a degree of output device independence.

And it's still in ascii (actually UTF-8) that one can read by eye if
necessary, digitally sign (once folks settle on a standard method),
and "grep".

Yes, drawings and graphics would still be an nuisance.

		--karl--

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From: Francis Dupont <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 19:20:56 +0200

In your previous mail you wrote:

   There are products which can produce and read these formats
   from multiple manufacturers.

=> do you know a free product which can produce PDF format on
   any platform?

=> I will object if there is no way to produce PDF RFCs as easily (?)
   as PostScript RFCs today.

Regards

[email-masked]

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From: Marc Horowitz <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Aug 1999 02:21:58 -0400

>> => do you know a free product which can produce PDF format on

ghostscript (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html) will convert
from ps to pdf.

>>    as PostScript RFCs today.

I don't think pdf is a good solution right now, but there is freely
available software out there to do the conversion.

		Marc