Why PDF vs .doc?

[DM_Matt]

What everyone else said, and its a lot easier for me to make them since I'm on a Mac.

In OS X, the print dialog box always has a print to pdf button. In Tiger, the feature has been significantly expaned so that the print box now has a pdf menu with not only save as pdf, but email as pdf, postscript pdf, pdf and fax, and encrypted pdf.

 

[Nifft]

And there are still a lot of people who don't have MSWord, or who use other wordprocessors.

"Are still"?

I'll bet there are more now (as a percentage of people on-line) than there were 10 years ago. More options, and reasonable-quality free alternatives, AND lots of 3rd world folks who can't afford proprietary stuff.

Cheers, -- N

 

[HellHound]

Oh, I agree Nifft... But an increasing number of people without MSWord are "still" people without MSWord.

 

[Gruns]

Nice.

I had no idea there were so many ways to create PDFs for free. I thought the whole idea of PDFs was so that Adobe could make lots of money selling the creator, after giving away the reader to everyone for free. Figured Adobe would have some kind of patent or something.
Anyway... who wants to help playtest some adventures in fabulous PDF format?
Thanks for the info!
Gruns

 

[Nifft]

Oh, I agree Nifft... But an increasing number of people without MSWord are "still" people without MSWord.

"You are technically correct... the best kind of correct!"

-- N

 

[Psionicist]

Also note microsoft word-files are proprietary and not documented, it's a closed file format. Open a doc-file in notepad, and try to make sense of it. You probably can't. That's what the actual Word program is for, to make sense of the weird data inside the doc file. Problem is, only microsoft and word knows exactly how to "translate" the weird data in the doc file to make pretty formatted text, tables and whatever is in the document. Other word processors have to guess how it works, and microsoft works very hard with existing patent laws and the like to make it illegal (or atleast a gray zone) to use any other software than microsofts own. You can call it a monopol or lock-in strategy, because once you've saved your file as doc you can't read it as intended without microsofts software. Noone knows if microsoft will somehow make it illegal to reverse engineer formats in the future, and no one knows if microsoft will be around in 10 years, which means no one knows if your doc-files will be readable in the future.

As an example, take zip. Zip-files are thoroughly documented, any programmer can read the specification and find out how a zip-file works. This means zip-files will always be readable, you will be able to open zip-files in 50 years. It's the same thing with JPG images, it's an open, documented format. And HTML files. And pretty much every other file format except for doc, xls and so on. They are not documented. Many people dislike this so MS have promised the next doc format will be open, but in reality it's not, it still have proprietary and undocumented parts. For the tech geeks the new doc-format is xml-files but the actual xml data doesn't have to be open for the xml to be.

PDF files are slightly better because it's documented, but Adobe seems to screw up now and then and make new pdf-versions incompatible with previous ones. So PDF is not much better than DOC, just a bit.

If you want to write documents that will live forever, I suggest you use TeX or LaTeX. It's the most popular option in scientific circles, and these guys are smart. =)

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Another thing that some authors like, is the ability to really lock down a PDF with passwords, so folks can't alter (or copy and paste I guess) it.

I can tell you from experience that if a person does have the latest version of Acrobat professional installed on their computer than they actually can copy and paste images and text from documents that they open that are locked by others.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Oh, I agree Nifft... But an increasing number of people without MSWord are "still" people without MSWord.

There is AbiWord. It is completely free and available for many platforms.

 

[Morte]

Another thing that some authors like, is the ability to really lock down a PDF with passwords, so folks can't alter (or copy and paste I guess) it.

Just as a rider... Some of us who use electronic documents to e.g. paste bits together from various places, organise, and print them really don't like this. So think carefully about that if you get into publishing.

[Also, when one copies from PDFs it usually inserts hard line breaks and loses text wrapping. And table formats go straight down the pan. And PDFs are set up to be printed exactly one way, on one paper size that's used on one continent. And if a PDF with two columns is awkward for viewing on screen, that's tough. Me, I'd rather have RTF or HTML -- it's not as good looking as PDF but it's more useful. But I am doomed to be ever in the minority on this, because the market are mostly not buying stuff to use but rather to collect, so ignore me.]

 

[Arc]

I can tell you from experience that if a person does have the latest version of Acrobat professional installed on their computer than they actually can copy and paste images and text from documents that they open that are locked by others.

Really? I haven't played around with Professional that much, but I don't think many people do. It's either a several hundred dollar liscense, or a bit of work looking for it on pirated software sites. Neither case seems to be really representitive of the typical end user (as far as I can tell, there may be more conclusive data that shows a link or lack thereof)