Re: 7.1 printed manuals

Bruce Momjian writes:

> Also, shouldn't we be distributing PDF files rather than PS files. I
> always considered PS files to be unportable because they assume you have
> the same fonts with identical font spacing installed on your machine.
> PDF embeds the fonts inside the file.

PS is more appropriate for printing, PDF is better for browsing. But yet
better for browsing is HTML, so there isn't much of a niche for PDF.

> The other nifty feature of PDF files is bookmarks. They are pdfmarks
> placed in the PS file which generates a bookmarks lists in Adobe
> Acrobat. I find it allows people to jump around in the text much
> quicker. I used it in the PDF version of my book. It is automatically
> generated by LaTeX for every Chapter/Section in the book. Not sure if
> you can do that with Applixware.

If you use pdfjadetex then you'll get internal links. There's an example
I just created at <http://www.postgresql.org/~petere/user.pdf>.
(Coincidentally, I've just spent the afternoon upgrading jadetex and
butchering my TeX installation to enlarge the internal tables.) The
quality is okay, but it's not something I would sell. The line breaking
has serious problems with long words (URLs, filenames), and some tables
are way beyond good and evil.

Of course you can just use ps2pdf and get no links. But then you don't
really need the pdf.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net http://yi.org/peter-e/