On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 13:21:15 -0700, Walter <walter@digitalmars.com> wrote:

>
> "Charles Banas" <greywolf@greyfade.net> wrote in message
> news:oprn7a4py08ctebf@news.digitalmars.com...
>> the GCC source is available at http://gcc.gnu.org for download at any
> time.
>> it's actually not that big.
>
> It's 26Mb compressed!
>
i guess cable and DSL have warped my mind, eh?

i actually have to think about what it decompresses to.  with only 270MB free space on a drive with 4kb blocks, GCC decompresses to over 350MB total (150MB actual, i think) and the linux kernel decompresses to a little over 300MB.  but i somehow manage to keep it all straight. :)

>> i'll send you the files ASAP, though.
>
> Thanks!
>
done.  enjoy.

-- 
Charles "grey wolf" Banas

"J. Daniel Smith" <J_Daniel_Smith@HoTMaiL.com> wrote in message news:b8c0du$r6f$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> These days I would say that PDF is *MUCH* more widespread than raw PS
files;
> the Adobe Acrobat Reader is the way to go (and it even works as a "plug
in"
> in IE).

That's true, but pdf has its own bugs. You can't cut bits of text to the clipboard. You can't convert it to text without emailing it to an Adobe service, which produces raw text that is nearly unusable. (That said, Google's translater is much better.) The IE plugin renders PDF files in a blurry font. The page format just doesn't fit well on a typical computer display.

HTML doesn't suffer from any of these problems. HTML automatically adjusts to your display size (bring up some of the DMC online documentation, and resize the window!), it's rendered crisply, it's easy to use without any proprietary tools (I do all my HTML with a simple text editor), it can be read by practically any machine, and if that fails, you can still read it with an ordinary text editor.

The DMC++ documentation was originally all in pdf. I converted it all to HTML, and am well convinced of the superiority of the latter. Just compare the two side by side!

It sounds like some of your PDF problems are caused from scanned images; I've had no problem copying text from a PDF file or seeing clear fonts on my screen.  Take a look at some of the files at http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/technotes/acrobatpdf.html. Remember, PDF is intended to be an electronic piece of paper; you're right in that PDF files sometimes don't work well on a computer screen, but that's mostly the fault of the document's creator, not the PDF format itself.

I was trying to clarify the differences between PDF and PostScript, not HTML.  I agree that for many things HTML is the way to go for the reasons you site.

   Dan

"Walter" <walter@digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:b8c657$uud$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> "J. Daniel Smith" <J_Daniel_Smith@HoTMaiL.com> wrote in message news:b8c0du$r6f$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> > These days I would say that PDF is *MUCH* more widespread than raw PS
> files;
> > the Adobe Acrobat Reader is the way to go (and it even works as a "plug
> in"
> > in IE).
>
> That's true, but pdf has its own bugs. You can't cut bits of text to the clipboard. You can't convert it to text without emailing it to an Adobe service, which produces raw text that is nearly unusable. (That said, Google's translater is much better.) The IE plugin renders PDF files in a blurry font. The page format just doesn't fit well on a typical computer display.
>
> HTML doesn't suffer from any of these problems. HTML automatically adjusts to your display size (bring up some of the DMC online documentation, and resize the window!), it's rendered crisply, it's easy to use without any proprietary tools (I do all my HTML with a simple text editor), it can be read by practically any machine, and if that fails, you can still read it with an ordinary text editor.
>
> The DMC++ documentation was originally all in pdf. I converted it all to HTML, and am well convinced of the superiority of the latter. Just compare the two side by side!
>
>

Walter wrote:

> That's true, but pdf has its own bugs. You can't cut bits of text to
> the clipboard. You can't convert it to text without emailing it to an
> Adobe service, which produces raw text that is nearly unusable.

Oh really? I've had similar problems with so far very few files. There
is a text selection tool in acrobat reader, which allows you to select
text and then copy it into clipboard. And if this method works, there
are also free tools which would extract the whole text for you.

Now, if it doesn't work and letters appear blocky if you zoom closely
in, that probably means it was created with a mistake. Some distros of
TeX prefer rasterising single letters into bitmaps when converting into
PostScript, to ensure high printing speed and quality. Then this
document might get converted into PDF and stays illegible on screen, but
if you print it it might look very good. It also becomes a collection of
bitmaps and looses text meaning, so you cannot search in such documents
or extract text. My MikTeX DVI2PS files without such a problem. There
also exists DVI2PDF which always gets high-quality PDF output, but
sometimes fails to work at all.


> (That said, Google's translater is much better.) The IE plugin
> renders PDF files in a blurry font. The page format just doesn't fit
> well on a typical computer display.

Right.

> HTML doesn't suffer from any of these problems. HTML automatically
> adjusts to your display size (bring up some of the DMC online
> documentation, and resize the window!), it's rendered crisply, it's
> easy to use without any proprietary tools (I do all my HTML with a
> simple text editor), it can be read by practically any machine, and
> if that fails, you can still read it with an ordinary text editor.

Right. But some people prefer writing TeX - it is very easy to read, and
it is very well structured and need not impose any formatting. Thus it
converts perfectly well to HTML, and of course to printed documentation.

> The DMC++ documentation was originally all in pdf. I converted it all
> to HTML, and am well convinced of the superiority of the latter. Just
> compare the two side by side!

:)

-i.

"Ilya Minkov" <midiclub@8ung.at> wrote in message news:b8cab3$11ki$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> > That's true, but pdf has its own bugs. You can't cut bits of text to the clipboard. You can't convert it to text without emailing it to an Adobe service, which produces raw text that is nearly unusable.
> Oh really? I've had similar problems with so far very few files.

I read a lot of pdf files I find on the web, and I find it with all of them. You can't even save the file - you need to back up and right-click on the hyperlink to it.

> There
> is a text selection tool in acrobat reader, which allows you to select
> text and then copy it into clipboard.

Hmm. I was using the click & drag method, which is how you copy text with everything else. Is there something I missed?

"Walter" <walter@digitalmars.com> escreveu na mensagem news:b8cjh4$19s9$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> "Ilya Minkov" <midiclub@8ung.at> wrote in message news:b8cab3$11ki$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> > > That's true, but pdf has its own bugs. You can't cut bits of text to the clipboard. You can't convert it to text without emailing it to an Adobe service, which produces raw text that is nearly unusable.
> > Oh really? I've had similar problems with so far very few files.
>
> I read a lot of pdf files I find on the web, and I find it with all of
them.
> You can't even save the file - you need to back up and right-click on the hyperlink to it.


There's a toolbar available in the Adobe Acrobat plugin, so you can click in the save button. AFAIK its default is 'on', but you can hide it at will.


> > There
> > is a text selection tool in acrobat reader, which allows you to select
> > text and then copy it into clipboard.
>
> Hmm. I was using the click & drag method, which is how you copy text with everything else. Is there something I missed?

Use the tooltips Luke ;-)
There's an icon with a T and a dotted square. It's the text selection tool.
Enable it and the mouse cursor will enter in text selection mode, allowing
selection, copy & paste, etc.


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"Daniel Yokomiso" <daniel_yokomiso@yahoo.com.br> wrote in message news:b8clh6$1b37$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Use the tooltips Luke ;-)
> There's an icon with a T and a dotted square. It's the text selection
tool.
> Enable it and the mouse cursor will enter in text selection mode, allowing selection, copy & paste, etc.

You're right, that's the trick. Thanks!

Walter wrote:
> HTML doesn't suffer from any of these problems. HTML automatically adjusts to your display size (bring up some of the DMC online documentation, and resize the window!), it's rendered crisply, it's easy to use without any proprietary tools (I do all my HTML with a simple text editor), it can be read by practically any machine, and if that fails, you can still read it with an ordinary text editor.

Disadvantages of HTML for printed documentation:
   - you can't create a neat printout
   - the toc is pretty useless without page numbering
   - you can't create an index
   - ...

A printed documentation is IMHO somewhat better than an online documentation
in certain situations:
   - if you want to annotate what you read
   - if you want to get a real overview (read from A-Z)

--
Helmut Leitner    leitner@hls.via.at Graz, Austria   www.hls-software.com

Helmut Leitner wrote:
> Disadvantages of HTML for printed documentation:
>    - you can't create a neat printout

If you use CSS to create a style sheet for your document, you can use the @page media selector to add special formatting for printing, including page numbering and per page headers and footers.

>    - the toc is pretty useless without page numbering

Creating the pagenumbers is not that hard, but linking them to your toc is. I think you could probably do it using xsl:fo[1] and xsl:t[2] .

>    - you can't create an index

with xsl:t that is a sinch.

>    - ...
> 
> A printed documentation is IMHO somewhat better than an online documentation
> in certain situations:
>    - if you want to annotate what you read

The w3c has a working group that is developing a system call annotea, which is like a digital sticky note crossed with wiki-like community features, so you can annotate a webpage, and set the annotation to be public if you like, you also get to put hyperlinks and cross-references.

>    - if you want to get a real overview (read from A-Z)

Agreed, I can't read from a monitor for more than a few minutes at a time, and you can't keep a finger in a page that you want to flick back to latter (yet)...

I'm a web-guy, it's my job to advocate [X|HT]ML...

Alix...

-- 
            Alix Pexton
Webmaster - http://www.theDjournal.com

            Alix@theDjournal.com

Walter wrote:

> It's 26Mb compressed!

Yeah it's huge.  However not all of the stuff in there is source code.  There is a lot of documentation and testsuite stuff in there.  Plus libary support for C++, and Java/Objc/ADA compilers and test stuff for all those too.  There are zillions of little test cases for C and C++ in there.  I'd think they'd be good to run through DMC++ for someone who felt like going bughunting.