"Lars T. Kyllingstad" <public@kyllingen.NOSPAMnet> wrote in message news:ilcmaf$19dg$1...@digitalmars.com... > > Based on your above comments, I get the feeling that you don't find > typography important at all. But typography is at least as important as > any other design decision, and most people do care about design. >
I wouldn't say I find it to be *zero* importance, I just find it to be of much less importance than UI. And the UI is something I find all PDF readers I've tried to be severely deficient in compared to web browsers (heavily animated sites notwithstanding). And I really think those UI issues have more to do with the nature of PDF than just the quality of the readers. > > I wish the designers of web sites and browsers would pay more attention > to typesetting issues and spend less time on bloating the web with Flash > animations and JavaScript misfeatures. > That I can agree with. I'd *much* rather have a slightly better font and typesetting than flashing, flying, spinning bullcrap. Heck, I'd rather have *worse* fonts and typesetting than Flash/JS misfeatures :) > And please note that I'm not saying PDF is perfect for everything. > Actually, I agree with you that the only thing it is *perfect* for is > printing. Right. I realize that. > But it *is* preferable over HTML in some situations, and > scientific/technical literature is one of those. Novels are another > example. > Well, I'd much prefer html for any of those. I *really* *really* hate trying to read anything in a pdf viewer. I'm actually very surprised that anyone finds it practical. > If someone comes up with an alternative format for on-screen document > reading that does away with obsolete artifacts of printed media, such as > page breaks, odd/even page margins, etc. and has better hyperlinking > capabilities than PDF, but still lets you embed fonts and have full > control over other typesetting issues, I'd be happy to use it. > > Heck, web browsers with decent typesetting engines would be a *huge* step > in the right direction. I'd be all for that stuff as well. Heck, I'm normally one of the first people to agree that HTML, CSS and web browsers have serious problems. But at least I can get by with them (thanks largely to NoScript) as opposed to pdf which I find to be nearly intolerable. I guess there's two good things I can say about pdf's and pdf viewers though: There's rarely any idiotic scripted or multimedia nonsense, and it's not as hard to find pdf viewers that actually obey my system's visual settings.
