report on bb in PDF format taking the micky?

jwt

In the course of researching some stuff for the newstalk interview* I noticed that .Gov, Comreg, Forfas reports etc are mainly in PDF format.

A well and wonderfull if you have a fast connection, but given that a lot of people interested in this stuff are on dial up.

Struck me a slightly absurd

John

* Not that I got to use any of it,

Moriarty

PDF is probably used because (1) the reader is free (2) you can get readers on oodles of OSs (3) however you format your document, you can be guarenteed it'll look exactly the same for every person that sees it.

It's much preferable to word .docs in any case.

jwt

yeah I know but..............


Any way whats wrong with txt files

cue huge long rambling "I remember when........"

John

Moriarty

shure when oi was a lad, reading it in binary was good nuff for em!

dahamsta

"We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in a lake!"

damien

There's always a Monty Python or Simpsons quote that can be used to add greater weight to any argue.

dahamsta

Absolutely.

"Snap snap, grin grin, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more?"

eircomtribunal

I am thinking about publicising a critical ("black cap") review of the Forfas broadband report.

The best way to do so for me would be to highlight passages and add comments, corrected figures etc. in the review mode of "Acrobat Professional".

But this can only be viewed in "Acrobat Professional", which most people might not have a hold of.

Any suggestions?

P.

P.S.: This Forfas report is riddled with atrocious flaws.

SkepticOne

I think most of these government reports could be done better in simple html. Plain text would be too limited as it would not allow for graphs and diagrams. Acrobat is better than word though.

Cryos

PDF Files do not require the entire document to be downloaded before you can use it, they are a dynamic document like Flash, being that if the document is 200 pages and is 3mb you can view the document over the internet with nearly any connection because it streams it, the pages are available as they are downloaded and the user does not have to wait for the entire 3mb to download before they can view it.

jwt

Unless your impatient like me and want to skip to the end straight away

John

nahdoic

eircomtribunal wrote:

I am thinking about publicising a critical ("black cap") review of the Forfas broadband report.

The best way to do so for me would be to highlight passages and add comments, corrected figures etc. in the review mode of "Acrobat Professional".

But this can only be viewed in "Acrobat Professional", which most people might not have a hold of.

Any suggestions?

P.

P.S.: This Forfas report is riddled with atrocious flaws.

Hmm if you use open office you can export a pdf easily - and I'm sure there is some converter on the web that will convert a pdf into a readable format for open office. (unfortunately openoffice doesn't open pdf's on its own)

DonegalMan

Blitz wrote:

you can view the document over the internet with nearly any connection because it streams it

Good article about this very topic in this month's PC Pro Magazine.

Technolog: Access all areas
David Fearon [PC Pro]

It's about time our differing requirements were addressed by web designers
I'm writing this column from a parallel universe. Honestly. It's great here: no wars; no disease. But it's the little things that make it so pleasing; I can hardly believe it's never occurred to me to visit before.

Over here, Adobe Acrobat loads up in under a second and has a memory footprint so small it barely registers in Task Manager. And when I innocently follow a link on a web page that turns out to lead to a PDF file, Internet Explorer doesn't seize up for 30 seconds. And when I press Page Down to scroll down the PDF, Internet Explorer doesn't seize up for 30 seconds. And when I hit the Print button to print the PDF, Internet Explorer doesn't seize up for 30 seconds.

Cryos

CMS Website software such as Mambo http://www.mamboportal.com have a live converter built in them, very few good websites are using an html website these days, its generaly their own grown CMS system or an already done system.

HTML was very good when it came out but its fast being replaced with PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and DHTML