BOM Info

[Nate Smith]

Originally posted by mehtank


sure, for the diagrams and all, pdf is fine, but where its not needed, can't they just go with text to make it easier for us? or if you insist on fancy formatting or whatever, i'm sure it wouldn't be that much more difficult to html-ize it. how crucial is it that everyone read it in the same font?

A few reasons why I think that the PDF choice is better than using something like plain text:

-It allows FIRST to do a straight conversion from the actual working document that they send to the printers for the hard copy manual to what they give us in digital form, without having to worry about "OK, this section is all text, so let's make that one format X, but this section has all these diagrams in it, so let's make that format Y" Converting a document to Acrobat format is as easy as selecting a different printer in the program you're using.

-It allows FIRST, in the updates, to refer to something that was said in a previous document as "rule M14 on page XXX," allowing us to find what they are referring to much faster than having to read through the entire section that rule M14 is in, looking for the right page.

-Other possible formats pose their own problems. For example, even the "plain text" format has differences, depending on what platform you are using. For example, in a MS-DOS/Windows system, a end of line in plain text is denoted as ASCII characters 13 and 10(carriage return and line feed). In Macintosh and Unix systems(at least some of them), one of those two characters(I think the line feed) is left out. So, if you were to choose to use a MS-DOS "plain text" format, Mac and Unix users would have an extra line between each actual line of text. If you were to use a Mac text format, Windows or DOS users would see it as one continuous line. And while there are ways of denoting a page break in plain text, not all programs will recognize that notation when printing the file.

-Even something such as HTML poses its own problems. Putting aside the conversion issues mentioned above(not knowing what program FIRST is using to create the documents on their end, I can't say how easy it would be to convert the entire document, graphics and all,) what browsers do we want to support? Unless you design everything in HTML 1.0(which means no table support I believe), you run the risk of certain browsers not being able to view the page correctly. And if you say "designed for Browser X," you're back at the same problem we are now with Acrobat.

Also, a side note on the BOM. While I was temporarily unable to download the newest version of Acrobat Reader, I found an old 3.0 copy of Reader on one of the many CDs that I had laying around. It opened and printed the file without any problems. Version 3.0 is back from when Adobe was still releasing a 16-bit version for those who had not yet upgraded to Win9x. I would be very surprised if I could find a machine that would not run this program. I have a 133-MHz machine here, with 8MB RAM and Win98, that is able to open the file without any major problems, as long as I don't have anything else running.

Is PDF the perfect solution? I highly doubt it. Is it one of the best, considering the amount and type of data that is used? Based on what I've seen, I'd have to say so...