[KLUG Members] Html vs Adobe Acrobat

[Adam Williams]

>When downloading files/directories from various web sites, it seems more 
>common to see Adobe Acrobat formats than in the past. 

True.

>Yes, I have read 
>their sales pitch about portability and ease of viewing and printing,

All of which is true, BTW.  Which is very unusual for a technology
related sales pitch.  I'll refrain from bringing up M$'s 1 degree of
separation commercial and asking how things like XML & SOAP will
magically integrate closed-source legacy apps....   OOPS!  I brought it
up anyway... sorry :)

>but you 
>also have to install Adobe 

Yes, but it is free.  And while *^#$&*^*@ UGLY on every platform except
Win32 it does work quite well.  The nightmare I have seen a couple of
times lately is PDFs with embedded Active X controls!!! Why?  There goes
the whole point of using PDFs in the first place.

>and keep up with their versions 

True, and non-Win32 version lag behind.  I haven't seen an Acrobat 5 for
Linux yet.

>and wait for the program to load. 

Mmm.  The plugin (works with mozilla, netscape, and galeon) loads pretty
fast.

>I want to make a directory available for downlad with simple, printable HTML 
>files on a web site.  I could provide zip and tar files

tar and zip what?  Ability to process the content is the point of PDFs.

>OR pay the Adobe fees, 

Every linux distro comes with tools for converting postscript to pdf. 
Many GNOMEy apps like Gnumeric will produce PDFs from the print dialog.

>learn how to write files to their formats and only provide .pdf files. 
There are lots of libraries and object classes floating about to ease
the creation of PDFs from just about every programming language.

>I would rather provide only .tar and .zip flles.  Is the .pdf format the 
>better choice?

They serve entirely different purposed.  If you just want to sling about
slippets of HTML I'd use ".tgz".  Current versions of WinZip, etc... all
not read tgz and tgz beats the pants of zip.

If you want to distribute 'documents' (forms that will be printers, user
manuals, etc...) you should use pdfs.