Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
>> he's obviously stupid.
> More likely the author is simply thoughtless.
An extreme case of "thoghtless", because the size difference
from plain to PDF is huge, I'd guess about a factor 50, from
plain to HTML it's only a factor 2.
> plain text email markup works a lot less well than properly
> designed HTML.
My stoneage MUA tries to display HTML as HTML if available,
and your experiment here was hard to read, you used a rather
small font. IMHO it's okay if folks use HTML _iff_ necessary
in mail, sometimes (rarely) I also do it, trimming the MIME
overhead to a minimum manually - so that others with a plain
text UA might still find what I intended to say.
RfC 1855 got it wrong, monospaced fonts like Courier are still
the best choice for mail, and that won't change in my lifetime.
> IETF documents are dreadful to print out
type rfc1234.txt > prn is pretty simple, they come complete
with formfeeds. Admittedly the number of RfCs or I-Ds I ever
printed is zero.
> they will only print on -printers with a particular font and
> a particular size of paper.
Don't send them to your "xyz" printer driver, they are already
formatted, send them directly to /dev/lpt1 or similar. Or use
a "dumb" driver. Or better don't waste paper to print RfCs,
they are available online whereever you are... -)
> every two weeks acrobat asks to upgrade itself
Works for the as you said "most popular O/S on the planet" and
the reader. And at least there are upgrades for this O/S and
some others, it's less funny with my less popular OS/2.
But some PDFs generated with open office still work with my
old Acroreader 3, no "colorspace 6 not found" or other issues
like "cannot extract embedded font". And why should I want
any embedded fonts, my OS/2 has a nice Adobe Courier, a nice
Adobe Hevetica, even some ugly Times New Roman, that should
be good enough for anything I care about (excl. math.)
> it can't upgrade my copy which is the paid version, not the
> free one.
Maybe test this open office beast if you want to create PDFs
"visible with any AcroReader", i.e, 3 or better. <eg> That's
a new "law", good stuff is always version 3.x, DOS, PDF, HTML,
Warp, what else ?
Bye, Frank
_______________________________________________
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf