Web programming tools

[Yennie at aol.com]

<<No! Please! Not PDF! >>

I hate to get too off-topic, but this seems like a fairly misinformed shot at PDF. For starters, anyone writing a book would be well served to create PDFs: just ask the printer. You might want to consult anyone in any print-related industry: they're not all "stuffy academics" or board members. And those academics, many of them also distribute PostScript files: because they are at universities littered with UNIX machines, networked printers, etc and that may actually be the most convenient *and* best looking format.

Would you really want to print a book from a bunch of Microsoft Word files? Plain Text?

Anyway, maybe it would help to know:

a) Acrobat comes with a browser plug-in which is one of the more stable, convenient browser plugins around.

b) You can copy and paste from Acrobat just fine, including with the browser plugin. You just need to choose the text selection tool. The only limitation is that you are stuck with one page at a time.

I apologize if this sounds a bit harsh, but I have a real peeve for blasting products (or anything else) with little apparent perspective.

FWIW,
Brian

<<No! Please! Not PDF! 
PDF is useful for one thing only: convincing stuffy
academics that your online academic article is "the
real thing". And corporate boards of directors. Other
than that it sucks. Why?
1) I have to launch acrobat. 10-30 seconds downtime
(ugh)
2) I cannot copy and paste - so say you have code I
would like to reuse/edit, well ok I CAN coerce a PDF
file - do you want to? I sure don't.>>