Message-ID:  <199812202111.QAA23906@hilbert.math.albany.edu>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Sun, 20 Dec 1998 16:11:47 -0500
From: "William F. Hammond" <hammond@CSC.ALBANY.EDU>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      Re: portable LaTeX
Status: R

Randolph --

This is private because it has become quite far from LaTeX3
development.

I agree with you about "lynx", which in its own way is very much
up to date, not about "mosaic", which, at least for NCSA, is no longer
supported.

I also agree about lowest common denominators in general.

I find, however, that many people whom I find reasonable otherwise,
are of closed mind about least common denominators because they
do not care about those without one of a few mass market platform/os
combinations.  This applies even to people in the academic world.

I wonder if you know that many agencies of the U.S. government and
many agencies of state government are now very focused on the use
of PDF.  For example, NSF now requires the use of PDF with some
submitted materials.  It's positively Orwellian.

Most seem to prefer serving pdf to ps on the web because

  (1) it is perceived that very few in target audiences have ps
      viewing

  (2) it is perceived that most in target audiences have pdf
      viewing

  (3) pdf consumes somewhat less bandwidth than ps, which is important
      for those with dialup web connections

: One of the functions of the Adobe Distiller, which is presented as being
: part of the Adobe PDF system, is the abstraction of fonts to just the
: characters actually used and the removal of the resizing information;
: effectively, this destroys the font for any other purpose.

resizing information?  I don't know quite what this means.  I believe
that using "distiller" on ps files with type 1 fonts leads to scalable
pdf.

: |>|Maybe read http://www.YandY.com/download/pdf_from.pdf

More to the point: rather than adding only ps it is a shame that there
is not a parallel (lynx-readable) HTML version made from the same
original sgml/xml source.

:         BIG CLUE---WWW transfers are binary.

Perhaps you mean http?  (ftp is a protocol under the www, as are also
gopher and telnet.)  Even then I would want to double check the http
spec to make sure that some mime types are not understood to be 7 bit.

                                   -- Bill