Subject: Re: discouraged by .docx

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:38:33 +0100

On 27 November 2011 14:17, Eric Burger <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Naah.  We should update the 72-character ASCII limit to 40-characters.
> Not only will that work for all of these mobile devices, it will work
> on a TRS-80, too.

+1

While I hate all incarnations of "Proprietary Data Format" it would be
nice to transform the about ten PS RFCs to PDF/A, and then drop the odd
idea that everybody is interested to install "ghostscript" on their box
in 2011:  I'm not more interested to do this, PDF/A will do for _this_
purpose (= sustain the few PS RFCs for the next 50 years.)

For simple IETF slide shows I'd still prefer formats suited for limited
bandwidth plans.  PDF/A is an unrelated goal, e.g., I don't care about
the monospaced font details as long as it is monospaced and can handle
the simple i18n examples in IRIbis or EAI presentations.

-Frank

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From: Robinson Tryon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:01:26 -0500

> purpose (= sustain the few PS RFCs for the next 50 years.)

If there are on the order of 10 RFCs in postscript (or some other
format that can easily be converted to PDF/A), then yes, I think
shifting those over sounds like a good way to reduce format explosion.

My suggestion for PDF/A is largely predicated on optimization: As far
as I know, 100% of current authoring programs can output to PDF/A
(perhaps with an intermediate step), and many if not all devices that
are being used to consume non-RFC IETF content can display PDF/A.

> bandwidth plans.

File size is a valid concern, especially for people with per-MB plans
or with small pipes.

Of the 10 random IETF powerpoint presentations that I converted to
PDF/A using LibreOffice, file size ranged from 36K to 189K.
Interestingly, while the largest powerpoint (189K) was exported as the
largest PDF (3MB), a 110K powerpoint file shrank down to 42K when
turned into a PDF. A cursory glance seemed to indicate reasonable
fidelity of the exported files to the originals.

>  PDF/A is an unrelated goal, e.g., I don't care about

Given the nature of presentation formats, conversion to plain text
will lose a lot of information. Conversion to some flavor of HTML
seems like the most likely route, but may display somewhat differently
on different systems. I don't know of any comparison tests converting
powerpoint/impress files to PDF and HTML, and seeing how faithful the
exports are to the original. In my experience, HTML export from
MS-Office, LibreOffice, and LaTeX have all worked passably well.

Even though PDF support is so pervasive, I agree that it's suboptimal
to transfer a 3MB file that's 16 times larger than the input. That
being said, as long as file sizes are all under, say, 8MB, the
benefits of easy interoperability will probably outweigh the onus of
added file size for most consumers.

--R

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:39:47 +0100

On 2011-11-27 19:38, Frank Ellermann wrote:
> ...
> ...

Hear, hear.