Re: [tdf-discuss] New "LibreOffice Reader" Eliminates Need for "PDF Reader"

On 25 June 2011 10:02, timofonic timofonic <timofonic@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:42 AM, Nuno J. Silva <nunojsilva@ist.utl.pt>
> wrote:
> > On 2011-06-24, Andrea Pescetti wrote:
> >
> > > Marc Paré wrote:
> > > > if we were to promote a "quick and dirty"
> > > > "LibreOffice Reader", very much like the "Adobe Acrobat Reader", whose
> > > > sole purpose is to provide the ability to "read" ".odt" files, there
> > > > would be no need to carry .pdf formatted files.
> >
> > Heh. :-) Don't use Adobe Reader as an example of a "reader", use
> > instead some other PDF reader with a reasonable memory and disk space
> > footprint. (Unless that's what you meant by "quick and dirty".)
> >
> > > This, however, won't work. Document fidelity is not the aim of ODT
> > > files, while it is the aim of PDF files (example: font embedding, but
> > > one could find many more). Replacing PDF by ODT is just not feasible due
> > > to the formats themselves, not to the lack of an "ODF Reader".
> >
> > Font embedding is an issue, it could render the viewer useless.
> >
> > It's possible, at least, to make some room for "compatible documents",
> > by shipping a set of fonts with the viewer and announcing that as the
> > "standard fonts" for ODF viewer.
> >
> > Unless there's some required feature of ODT that's not possible to
> > reproduce in PDF, I suggest keeping with PDF for now: it is designed for
> > portability and it's vectorial, so there's no loss.
> >
> >
> > Someone suggested djvu (DeJaVU). I like djvu, I use it and I and spread
> > the word about it, but IMHO it's main use is for scanned documents
> > (making it so entire books can fit in a floppy!).
> >
> > Even if a pdf is larger than a djvu for the same document, if it was
> > directly exported to pdf, it's vectorial. Converting to djvu makes it
> > raster. IMHO that's a bad idea. YMMV.
>
> Are you sure about that? If yes, maybe there should be a Version 28
> with those improvements and more. Maybe DjVu format could get more
> succesful if TDF adopts it and promotes it as OASIS OpenDocument
> format (ODR?).
>
> It's the missing leg for the OpenDocument file format collection, I think.
>
> > --
> > Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)
> > gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
> >
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What is the purpose of pdf? It's for putting documents on paper. If you
simply want to read a document on screen use a browser. There was a project
to develop a Firefox plugin through the OpenDocument Fellowship but I think
it has stalled.  I would rather encourage people to read screen based stuff
with a browser instead of having to download pdfs when the information is
rarely ever printed. If it needs to be LibO will produce a pdf to do it.
Seems to me that a browser plugin is a lot simpler task and a lot more
useful. Get Google to sponsor it for Chrome.
-- 
Ian

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