Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonist
Hm, see if you can find the word "printing" in the main wikipedia definition:
"Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.
Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout 2D document (and, with Acrobat 3D, embedded 3D documents) that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics which compose the documents.
Formerly a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008."
Your argument is kind of like claiming, that a paper book sucks, because you' miss the ability to reflow and print the manuscript on 3x3" paper on your office printer.
And, yes, you CAN print plain text files too, but it doesn't make it a "format for printing.". |
It's further down...
Quote:
The PDF combines three technologies:
* A subset of the PostScript page description programming language, for generating the layout and graphics.
* A font-embedding/replacement system to allow fonts to travel with the documents.
* A structured storage system to bundle these elements and any associated content into a single file, with data compression where appropriate.
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It was built from the Postscript page description language mentality where you layout the page to a specific page size. It would work fine if the PDF was created for the 6" screen but then you'd have to download a new PDF if you want to read on a 10" screen.
The alternatives of zooming and panning are processor intensive and don't work well on the low power consumption processors in the current generation of dedicated readers.