Subject: RE: Why not PDF: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)

From: "Carroll, Diana C" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 10:03:07 -0700

My 2 cents worth:

I think that whatever format is chosen, file size is an important
consideration.  If you don't live/work  in a major metropolitan area,
high-speed Internet connections are not available, and it can take
ridiculous amounts of time to download a single large .pdf or .doc file.
The IEEE standards are a good example, even on a high-speed connection,
downloading a single 200-page document takes several minutes.  ASCII is
widely used because it is easy to generate, has very small file sizes,
and is viewable regardless of operating system or platform.  Any
successor to ASCII needs to have similar qualities in order to be
successful.  

GIF and PNG files are widely supported, but they also tend to be very
large files.  At best, if these files are going to be included, they
need to be optional.

Best wishes.
Diana 

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Dambier [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 8:24 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Why not PDF: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format
in Addition to ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)

Just try this good example:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/133654main_ESAS_charts.pdf

It is a nice promotion for the successor to the space shuttle.
Best store it localy before viewing.

It is a nice document with wonderful pictures. But building
the screens takes me hours.

That is one of the reasons why I am afraid of pdf.

Cheers
Peter and Karin Dambier

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 19:22:13 +0200

Carroll, Diana C schrieb:
> ...

-rw-r--r-- 1 jre Kein 313253 Jun 18 20:38 rfc3253.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 jre Kein 406626 Jun 18 20:42 rfc3253.html
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jre Kein 160576 Jun 18 20:56 rfc3253.chm
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jre Kein 413732 Jun 18 20:56 rfc3253.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 jre Kein 285569 Jun 19 18:18 rfc3253.txt

...by that measure we'd need to move to Microsoft Compiled Help Format, 
right?

Best regards, Julian

---

From: "Stephen Sprunk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 13:47:03 -0500

Thus spake "Julian Reschke" <[email-masked]>
>> The IEEE standards are a good example, even on a high-speed
>> connection, downloading a single 200-page document takes
>> several minutes.  ASCII is widely used because it is easy to
>> generate, has very small file sizes, and is viewable regardless of
>> operating system or platform.  Any successor to ASCII needs to
>> have similar qualities in order to be successful.  GIF and PNG files are 
>> widely supported, but they also tend to be very

sprunk@defiant:~> ls -l rfc3253*
-rw-r--r--    1 sprunk   users      245514 Mar  4  2002 rfc3253.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 sprunk   users       47077 Mar  4  2002 rfc3253.txt.gz

CHM files, like PDFs, are precompressed, so that's the amount you have to 
actually send over a slow dialup line.  HTML, XML, and TXT compress very 
well, so just looking at file sizes is not a fair comparison in most cases.

Even if the access line doesn't support compression, hopefully most archives 
of standards have something similar to Apache's mod_gzip so that the content 
is sent compressed from the server itself.

Still, this is illuminating; I expected the PDF form to be a lot more than 
69% larger than the uncompressed ASCII.  Still, there's only a few rather 
simple figures in that example, so it doesn't show how completely bloated 
IETF specs may get if we allow complicated diagrams in the PDF (or whatever) 
version but don't require them in a normative ASCII version too.

S

Stephen Sprunk        "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723           people.  Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS         smart people who disagree with them."  --Aaron Sorkin

---

From: "Bill Fenner" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 16:42:35 -0400

On the other hand, here's a document that we've been working on for a
while, always producing text and ps/pdf due to the inclusion of
graphical state machines:

-rw-r--r--   1 fenner  fenner  290444 Jun  9 14:34 pimspec.pdf
-rw-r--r--   1 fenner  fenner  340594 Jun 14 14:32 pimspec.txt

Interestingly, the PDF is smaller.  I didn't tweak anything to get
this - this was the completely naive "create postscript from the nroff
that generates the .txt" and "create pdf from that postscript"
workflow that we've been using for years.

On the other hand, I created what ghostscript (AFPL Ghostscript SVN
PRE-RELEASE 8.55 (2006-05-20)) claims to be PDF/A (I have to assume
it's -1B since groff doesn't output pdfmark annotations for headers
and footers), and it's much larger:

-rw-r--r--  1 fenner  wheel  1540094 Jun 19 13:18 pimspec-a.pdf

since this one has embedded font subsets even though they're courier,
times and symbol.

  Bill

---

From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:01:01 -0400

This spec is one where (through hosts of iterations) I regarded the  
ps / pdf versions as
the really useful formats and the ascii versions as basically broken.

Those graphical state machine images really did help at least me  
understand what was going on.

Regards
Marshall

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 23:23:59 +0200

> understand what was going on.

Can you please point to the file / RFC so we can observe this effect  
ourselves?

Thanks,

Iljitsch

---

From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:46:22 -0400

Sure :

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-pim-sm-v2-new-12.txt
http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-pim-sm- 
v2-new-12.ps

Regards
Marshall

On Jun 19, 2006, at 5:23 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

>> This spec is one where (through hosts of iterations) I regarded  
>> the ps / pdf versions as
> Can you please point to the file / RFC so we can observe this  
> effect ourselves?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Iljitsch