PDF

Alex Tweedly alex at tweedly.net
Sat May 12 20:54:41 EDT 2018



On 12/05/2018 21:08, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
>
> Per Postel's Law, reduce the stockpile of PDFs littering humanity's 
> infosphere by generating none except in the increasingly rare cases 
> where no other format is a better choice.
>
Good advice to improve the world :-). But unfortunately difficult if not 
impossible to follow for now.

As a software user I have a variety of ways to generate PDFs (scanner 
apps that generate them as default output for multi-page docs, many apps 
'export to PDF', any app can 'print to PDF', ..) and basically no app 
that I regularly use has a way (that I am aware of)  to create ePubs.

I often get sent PDFs, never been sent an ePub document.

As a Livecode developer, I have ready access to libraries to create and 
to read PDFs (ok, need to be a Business License holder for reading). 
There is no (AFAIK) library to create ePub; the only ePub reader I can 
find (thank you, James Hale) needs some work to pull out the main parts 
into a library, and then to make it explicitVariable-safe (and it does 
need that - a couple of the complaints it throws up are indeed lurking 
bugs, not simply false errors).

So I think we're a few years away from being able to replace PDF with 
ePub :-(

-- Alex.




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