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I first came across PDFs-Portable Document Format-when I
was after some data from the Oak Ridge, I was unable
to read their data sheets as neither our NT or Solaris system
had an Acrobat reader installed. Soon after that Acrobat
readers and documants seemed common enough, almost a standard,
there never seems to be a universal standard. I was using
Postscript, somepeople used Microsofts .doc. For plain text, using
plain text format would seem obvious. Anyway PDF is a reasnoble,
the main gripe I have is you can't hack a pdf file, well not
easily, it looks like a jpg file. To create them you don't
need the expensive Adobe Distiller or as I read in a
magazine some top end desktop publishing program, You convert
your file-any type- to a Postscript file then using Ghostscript
convert postscript to PDF.
Ghostscript is free from Aladin
software or if your running Linux it's probably on your
distribution, Ghost script is a PS file viewer, another thing
missing from Windows.
In windows there isn't any obvious support for Postscript.
A prn file saved by printing to file, an option on the
print setup menu, will produce a script file. I install
a print driver for a postscript printer from the widows install
CD, usually the xerox postsript printer that's at the bottom
of the list. So when you print to file with the postscript
printer selected your .prn file is postscript. I can't
remember if you have to change the extension to .ps. Anyway
now you have a postscript file all you have to do is open
it in ghostscript and convert to PDF, this is now a menu item
but if your working from the command line it's something like:
$:> ps2pdf my_file.ps my_file.pdf
I haven't really tried to edit PDFs, except when I have
to edit ones I created and still have the postscript(or
word document) files for, so it's a case of making new
ones. The pdf file looks like a picture[jpg] so I wouldn't
have thought you could edit it as a document, easily.
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