permaculture

[John Schinnerer <eco_living@yahoo.com>]

Aloha,

> The release of David Holmgren's material online has stimulated
> discussion on
> the international pemaculture listserv about hacking the PDF
> print-protection coding to enable the document to be printed from
> David's websit.

As someone else also posted, the print button is not necessarily
disabled, at least not for some of us...after the other post, I checked
a few of the articles David put up on my system (vanilla Win98 box,
Acrobat Reader 5.0, nothing at all fancy or out of the ordinary) and
there's no hacking involved - the print button was functional.

David, you might want to make sure people coming to the PDFs from
whatever various avenues they do come from are aware that you have not
provided them to be freely printed.  Appears there are some bugs in the
print button disabling...

I second the comments about PDF being lousy for screen reading.  I
usually won't read anything in PDF unless I absolutely have to.

Also, compared to plain text, simple structured text and even fancier
structured text such as HTML, etc. , PDF is IMO (for screen display) a
bloated file format and a bloody waste of bandwidth.  This is of course
partly because it carries all the info necessary for good quality
printed reproduction.

Adobe is very clever with the "free reader" marketing angle, but PDF is
not an 'open' format at all.  I believe there are some open source
alternatives in the works but I'm not up on that branch of open source
at all right now...warlock, you there?  Know of any open source PDF
alternatives?


=====
John Schinnerer, MA
--------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
Food - Shelter - Community
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net

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