Message-Id: <9307222000.AA09885@brown.edu>
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1993 16:02:18 -0500
To: kevin@scic.intel.com (Kevin Altis)
From: Andrew_Gilmartin@Brown.Edu
Subject: Re: Hello World.PDF
It is inappropriate to discuss Acrobat and PDF as one item. Acrobat is a
particular applicaiton of a PDF file.
You don't have to too carefully read the Portable Document Format Reference
Manual to see that it defines a structure suitable for multiuser,
multimedia use. Everything is versioned. Data values can be relative. The
file grows from the end (that is you don't have to rewrite the whole file
to add new or updated stuff). The format supports an unlimited set of
object types. It is even possible (with care) to separate the encoding of
the data from its presentation.
I agree that it is not a panacea, but PDF does provide a format far more
flexable than those found in WWW.
-- Andrew
-- Andrew Gilmartin Computing & Information Services Brown UniversityAndrew_Gilmartin@Brown.Edu (401) 863-7305