PDF vs. .doc [was Re: Boston Linux Conference December 3-4 ]

Price, Erik eprice at ptc.com
Mon Nov 25 10:07:20 EST 2002


> -----Original Message-----
> From: pll at lanminds.com [mailto:pll at lanminds.com]
> Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 9:36 AM
> To: Price, Erik
> Cc: pll at lanminds.com; Greater New Hampshire LUG
> Subject: Re: PDF vs. .doc [was Re: Boston Linux Conference 
> December 3-4
> ] 
> 
> Is this Mac OS X by chance?

That's what I meant by MacOS X. ;)

>I wonder if all they're doing is exactly 
> the same as Windows/UNIX, printing to postscript, but then converting 
> on the fly to PDF?  After all, OS X is BSD based, it would be trivial 
> to implement this kind of thing using ghostscript.

I can't seem to find the answer to that.  Once upon a time, I read
somewhere the sentence "MacOS X uses PDF as a native display format"
but never since have I been able to find out what that means (or even
that same statement again).  So whether all printable output is turned 
to a PDF before being displayed or whether it's done only when a user 
chooses to save as a PDF, I don't have the answer.  Perhaps someone
else on this list does.

> If this is Mac OS X, you might want to get an xterm or shell window 
> up and look for things like ps2pdf, pdf2ps, gs/ghostscript, etc.  It 
> wouldn't suprise me at all if they're already available.

I'll have to check it out when I get home, but even if they aren't, I
do know that the Fink project has ported these applications to install
easily via dselect on MacOS X (<http://fink.sourceforge.net/>).


Erik



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