PDF Explained

[Janina Sajka]

PDF is a proprietary postscript implementation. That means that its roots 
are in printing. It's great for that. It's a way of sending relatively 
small files across the net that print on almost any printer on almost any 
kind of computer and almost always come out looking the same. Really cool 
for people who are into printing and reading paper.
Of course, Adobe, the company that sells PDF tools has been a very smart 
marketer. For example, it sells its scanning software to Federal agencies 
as a way for them to get all their paper files into computer files that 
can be published online. An agency like the Federal Communications 
Commission gets a lot of paper that they want to publish on the net. So, 
they use Adobe's scanning software to scan all that paper into pdf files 
that they post on the web. If you ever look at an OCR rendition of some of 
these documents, you can quickly discern how poorly this translates into 
text that we, as blind users, need in order to read these documents. But, 
it prints looking about the same as the paper the FCC got in the mail.




 On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Rich Caloggero 
wrote:

> Can anyone explain exactly what PDF is. Most importantly, how it relates to
> postscript? My under    standing is that it is a data format, optimized for
> representing documents. It is a binary format, and not only     stores the
> document text, but font info, formatting info, links, bookmarks, and other
> objects like images and sound. It does include security/encryption
> provisions. Can anyone be more complete? I'm trying to get a handle on
> accessibility and understand more about the relationship between postscript
> and PDF.
> 
>                     Rich Caloggero
>                     MIT ATIC
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Gregory Nowak" <gnowak1 at uic.edu>
> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 9:43 PM
> Subject: Re: Hardware Question
> 
> 
> > Yeah, he should look at the bios first. However, my intention was to get
> the jumpers set first, see if it works as is, then if not, yes, do check the
> bios. I avoided the secondary controller option, because most 486 machines
> I've seen had to ide ports, that were in fact the one and only controller.
> So, I didn't want to totally confuse him, if this happened to be the case
> with his motherboard.
> > Greg
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 12:34:32PM +1100, Shaun Oliver wrote:
> > > On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> > >
> > > > You need to set a jumper on the hard drive as master (I've also seen
> some older drives where there was a master with slave option, use that if
> your drive has such a setting). You also need to set your cd-rom drive's
> jumper to slave. Hth.
> > > > Greg
> > > ok, just to add to this, you'll need to check your cmos/bios setings to
> > > ensure that your drives are being detected correctly.
> > > it's not just a matter of setting the jumpers and hoping for the best.
> > > this is where alot of people go wrong.
> > > if possible put the cdrom on a seperate ide controler and I personally
> > > would set it as secondary master. I will stand to be corrected on this
> but
> > > if that doesn't work, slave it to your hard drive as either a primary
> > > slave on the primary ide controler or as a secondary slave on the
> > > secondary ide controler.
> > > please feel free to correct me anyone as I don't always get things
> right.
> > > --
> > > qShaun Oliver
> > >
> > > Marriage is a three ring circus:
> > > engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering.
> > >                 -- Roger Price
> > >
> > > Email: shauno at goanna.net.au
> > > Icq: 76958435
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Speakup mailing list
> > > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >
> >
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org