Best PDF library

I will be generating PDFs. Which library is the most good?

I have examined so far:

http://www.lowagie.com/iText/
http://libharu.sourceforge.net/

What do you think?

>>1

I think that my soup needs more salt...

>>1
Don't, PDFs suck. Why would you want to generate that piece of shit? Everybody hates it. Proprietary format, ugly size, terrible viewers, shitty DRM, user-unfriendly, page-based, ...

But... but...  everybody uses them!

>>3

It's to sent out customer statements and invoices

The latest acrobat reader is actually quite good compare to the versions earlier

>>3
I don't hate it. Not properietary, what the fuck does "ugly size" mean, also good viewers, no DRM in my PDFs, not necessarily any more user-unfriendly than HTML, WHAT DO YOU MEAN, A FUKKEN PAGE-BASED PAGE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE? WHERE HAS WORLD GONE?

>>3
Stupid-as-hell seems to be all the rage on the text boards.  PDF is open and is the de facto standard for electronic document transmission.  Who cares that Adobe made it but is piss-poor at rendering it?  (Poppler FTW)

As for >>1's question, have you looked at cairo and ghostscript?

>>5
Why do you fuck your customers like that? If I were your customer I'd be very angry. I want text/plain; if you need rich text, text/html. Hell, I'll even take Word (ugh) before PDF. At least I can modify Word.

As for the latest PDF reader, cat shit vs. dog shit.

>>6-7
Yes, proprietary. Adobe can change it anytime without consensus. Ugly size means PDFs are hueg. Good viewers? I haven't seen any. KPDF and FoxIt Reader do what they can, but I wouldn't call that good viewer. Good viewer means it loads before my penis gets hard at Asian girls, it takes less RAM than Windows Calculator, it searches regular expressions, and most of all, it allows me to copy and paste contents properly, i.e. to do something useful out of my files.

PDFs support shitty DRM and shitty ActionScript and shitty Adobe shit. My web browser is far more user-friendly. Not only better to use. I meant user-friendly in the broadest sense of the word. My HTML browser is on my side. It will allow me to override creators' stupidity and it won't do whatever I don't like done in my computer. PDFs force stupid fonts and colours up my arse. And pages are backwards, retarded and inconvenient. We overcame pages (a natural limitation of paper) when we invented continuous buffers and scrollbars. Text flows normally, there's no need to lay gay shit out, etc. I only use paper to wipe my ass; for everything else I have a computer screen.

So now it's an "electronic document", huh? How fucking nice. Well sir, my files are not "electronic documents to browse on my digital lifestyle hub" or "licensed digital music to listen in my personal portable music pod". All of my files are octet-streams I want to treat and modify in any way I like. I don't need any faggot designer, any faggot browser, and much less any faggot Adobe telling me what I can do and how I can use my files. If somebody wants to give me text, they should give me text. Preferrably in a standard Unicode Transformation Format. For rich text, I'll accept W3C standards, even if they could be improved. But I won't take any shit I can't modify into something decent for my personal use. I won't take any shit that will force artificial restrictions on me, such as pages on a screen, and I won't take any shit that will not allow me to do something useful from it by means of transformating or reusing its contents.

>>8
tl;dr. Seriously. Get with the fucking program. Peace.

>>8

Calm down you ignorant fucker

>>8
Yep, you're just the kind of insipid twit I thought you were.  Since you're apparently to busy with your CP to learn how to read, PDF specification v1.7 (which can be read in full by anyone with an internet connection here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html [don't forget, folks!  It's not open!  Hur hur hur!] is currently undergoing review and adaptation to ISO standard by the AIIV.  This is following the wave of specialized PDF formats that have already seen this treatment (PDF/A, PDF/X, PDF/E, PDF/H, PDF/UA).

The distinction of "document" is made for a reason, simpleton.  PDF allows me to transmit a contract to another party with the confidence that they won't be able to change it before they sign it- plaintext does not.  It also allows me to be confident that the file I send to another professor will be readable exactly as I've typed no matter his or her platform of choice and what fonts and display libraries are installed (TeX? IPA? Fonts that I've created?  The list goes on).  Until you come up with arguments supporting your ignorance properly in the light of logic and common sense, you'll never be able to move forward.

PS: Try actually using KPDF (or anything poppler-based) before making comments.  A long PDF will load much faster than the equivalent HTML, especially when images are involved.

tl;dr: >>8 has failed miserably.  Saged for thread courtesy

>>11

But will it blend?

>>12
DURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR of course it will

>>11
Oooh they won't be able to change it fap fap fap. (There are free utilities to sign your octet-streams if you'd so need. You rarely do.)
Oooh my professional marketing catalogue fap fap fap. (Breaking news: I hate that shit. The second I'm using my W3C standards-compliant browser to browse the W3C-regulated web, and I'm offered a PDF, I close the page and move on to something else.)
Oooh a PDF, it looks so serious, this company must be serious business! fap fap fap. (Breaking news: You look like a retarded luser and a lousy web designer (and "web designer" was already an insult) if you do PDFs.)

Readable as you typed it. That's the kind of faggotry I was expecting from a PDF user. Who in the fuck are you to say how should others' octet-streams be interpreted? Why do your users have to cope with your shitty Courier font or retarded 5 cm margin? I want to use User-agents that act by my side, because they run on my machine. As such, I want to enforce whatever rules I want on how to render my octet-streams, and I like to be able to do something useful with them.

And of course, I use KPDF when I have to browse a stupid PDF because some moron wants to choose my fonts and put stones in my path. If I had to use acroread I'd have suicided by now.

>>14

You display a remarkable amount of retardation. Just because you can find a couple of examples where PDFs have annoyed you (probably due to nothing more than your unstable mood swings) does not mean that they are universally bad.

GTFO

>>14
Become a HERO!

>>14
Readable as you typed it. That's the kind of faggotry I was expecting from a PDF user. Who in the fuck are you to say how should others' octet-streams be interpreted? Why do your users have to cope with your shitty Courier font or retarded 5 cm margin?
Are you serious? I mean are you honestly for real?

You reek of the kind of idiot who a) has only ever used Acrobat; b) thinks webpages are how business documents and scientific articles are published; and c) has never done any kind of serious typesetting.

If I typeset a document and send it to you, I want it to look THE WAY I INTENDED. I don't want you to be able to change the font, to fuck with the formatting. If you decide to print it, I want it to look EXACTLY as it would if anyone else printed it, regardless of the printer model, operating system, document viewer, or the idiot at the keyboard. This is why PDF exists, and this is why it's the de facto standard in electronic documents.

>>15
PDFs have annoyed me every time. Every time I'm offered a PDF I refuse if I can, and use Google or pdftotext or something if I can before KPDF or FoxIt Reader, because a PDF file means useless read-only shit (hardly copypasta, don't think about vector data), pages in my screen, and forced retarded styles up my ass.

>>17
has only ever used Acrobat
I never use that piece of shit; like I said, I'd kill myself if I had to use that. I use KPDF on Lunix and FoxIt Reader on Windows.

thinks webpages are how business documents and scientific articles are published
I prefer text/plain. If that's not possible, I'll take text/html, possibly after converstion from TeX. Then perhaps I'd even take CHM if it's for Windows. But everything else tends to disgust me. I prefer DOCs to PDFs though; at least I can do something useful from the DOCs.

has never done any kind of serious typesetting
I've done serious text editing and manipulation. In fact, that's a good part of my job and spare time entertainment. I handle large collections of files, non-text as well. I treat them equal. I view them however I please. I modify whatever I want.

If I typeset a document and send it to you, I want it to look THE WAY I INTENDED.
Well then, fuck you sir. Once the file enters my computer, I view it THE WAY I WANT because it's my fucking file. I went as hard as writing specific CSS to force on web sights I frequent whose styles I don't like for some reason (like gay white background when I need to look at it for hours (lol it looks like paper lol lol easy easy luser luser)).

I don't want you to be able to change the font
But I do, because it's my file. You cannot restrict how I use it. I may very well print an hex dump of it on toilet paper and wipe my ass with it. Or I could use it as the seed for pseudo-random number generators. Who are you to tell me how should I handle octet-streams residing in my computer? It's MY fucking machine, not yours, and they are MY letters on MY screen. Stop choosing for me.

If you decide to print it, I want it to look EXACTLY as it would if anyone else printed it
I don't print shit. I use my screen, it's bigger than A4 sheets, and I prefer leaves on trees to sheets on my desk. Plus they take space. And I can't find with regular expressions. And they are paged. And they break. And they are expensive. And they cannot be modified easily. Not even copypasta. Ugh, paper sucks! Who'd want something printed?

If I typeset a document and send it to you, I want it to look THE WAY I INTENDED.
That's because you're a fucking idiot. INTERNET ISN'T PAPER, GRAMPS.

>>18
hardly copypasta
If you're saying you can't copypasta things out of the PDF, you can.
  And if you want to change the document, why not download the source of it instead and change that!  Most serious experts publish their sources and only offer PDFs for poor Windows users.
Once the file enters my computer, I view it THE WAY I WANT because it's my fucking file.
Not if you've only licensed it.

>>20
Not good to copypasta rich text and keep format and position. Even worse for vector data. If I'm offered the sources, I'll happily take them.

Not if you've only licensed it.
But I'm a GNAA fag and a pirate.

Guys, leave >>18 alone/ignore him.  It's pretty obvous that he's kind of slow, comparing typesetting to text editing, and what.  Failing to notice that KPDF has search built into it.  Not realizing that someone editing the contract you send them can fuck you over royally.  Or that allowing someone to change what you've written could allow them to even steal work you've done (this is an important issue in the academic world).  For not noticing that, while he has the file, he doesn't actually own it because text is the sole property of the one who wrote it.  Give the dumbass a break.  This is America- we even let dumbshits like him graduate high school.

PDF has an aditional benefit. It's excellet for office work, with its review and commentary system. The only thing I have seen that compares to that is Microsoft Word. And no, "diff" is NOT an excellent tool for reviews. But >>22 summed it up quite nicely.

>>18
>>20
has never done any kind of serious typesetting
I've done serious text editing and manipulation.
>>22 pretty much nailed it on the head. Comparing typesetting to text editing very clearly illustrates that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.

In everything you've said, you keep referring to webpages. For fuck's sake, not everything can or should be designed with HTML and CSS. By deliberately avoiding PDFs and converting them to text, of which you seem so proud, you have no sense of what a properly typeset article should look like.

It's much more important than viewing it the way you want. If you break the formatting of my article and then redistribute it, you make me look like an idiot. If you change the content of my contract, you can legally fuck me over.

"serious text editing and manipulation"... You sound like a freelance editor for shitty news editorials or something. You've been dealing with text for 20 years, and you get frustrated because you can't edit the PDFs your clients send you. If this sounds like your job, then PDFs are obviously not for you; you're supposed to do your work BEFORE the document ever hits PDF format. That's not a fault of PDF, it's a fault of your clients.

Anyway...

Hey, Mr. >>1, have you had any luck yet?

>>24
But why on Earth do you keep insisting, that everything should be designed with PDF? And yes, it is the fault of the format and it's advocates, that you can't view it with the style you want and have to suffer pain instead.

tl;dr - text/html for text intended for reading on computer screen, PDF for printable documents AND THOSE LEGAL NOTICES IN ALLCAPS YOU CAN'T EVEN PRINT OUT BECAUSE OF DRM AND THEN HAVE TO READ ON SCREEN AS THOSE HUGE LETTERS WEREN'T ANNOYING ENOUGH.

God... graphic designers are so stupid.

>>26 God... graphic designers are so stupid.
lol, says the guy who's tl;dr is longer than his post.

Where does he say that everything should be in pdf, you ass?  You're the only one trying to assert an absolute here.  HTML and CSS have their place.  That place is in webpages on the internet, because it's flexible and forgiving of errors because most people (like yourself) are too stupid to follow W3C guidelines (proof that people don't take it seriously).  PDF has its place, too.

tl;dr (a real one): >>26.  Enough.  You're a fuckwit.

>>25

Haven't decided yet, I'm evaluating some commercial ones

e.g. http://www.pdftron.com/downloads.html

>>28
PROTIP: Generate TeX data and convert it to PDF using your TeX distribution's tools.

>>29
PROTIP: Plaintext or GTFO

>>30
Plaintext generated by GROFF is fine.

>>30
PROTIP: Show me understandably formatted math in plaintext or GTFO.

>>26
But why on Earth do you keep insisting, that everything should be designed with PDF?
What the fuck? The last half of my post deals with a specific example of where you SHOULDN'T use PDF.

Just shut the fuck up and go away already.


>>28
You really shouldn't need any standalone "PDF generation" tool; pretty much any decent software these days can export directly to PDF. Maybe you're just using the wrong tool. What exactly is it you're trying to make into a PDF?

An ordinary document, like something out of Word? -> OpenOffice (free) exports to PDF, Word almost certainly does too...

Something graphical, like a poster? -> Inkscape (free) exports to PDF, as do pretty much all proprietary graphics suites (Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, etc)

Something in between, such as a pamplet? -> Scribus (free) does PDF, though it's very buggy. Adobe InDesign and other such programs all export to PDF.

A scientific article or report? -> LaTeX renders PDF natively. Any IDE you use should have a big button to render it. It's more portable than DVI anyway; you should use it all the time.

If you're trying to "print to PDF" from an arbitrary application, most Linux distributions have this built in, and there are free PDF printer drivers for Windows. If you want to pay for it, Adobe Distiller is very good. Really though, you should be using the right application for the job, and exporting directly rather than printing to PDF.

FUCK PDF, EOT

Guys, leave >>22 alone/ignore him. He's pretty "obvous"ly an Adobefag, thinking of "read-only" digital files (retarded and contradictory). Failing to notice I already knew KPDF can search, though not with regular expressions. Not realizing that files in someone's computer are soemone's files in someone's computer, thus subject to alteration. Not realizing one can hack PDFs too if he so desires, so PDF doesn't give any extra security anyways; never anything except for signed files, for which you don't need PDFs. Or that people will get fucked over by lawyers if they steal shit from others and try to make money from it anyways (this is an important issue in fucking with people). For not noticing that, he thinks he owns files in everybody else's computers. Give the dumbass a break. He lives in America - lots of lawyers, patents, DRM, DMCA and "rights-management" dumbshits there.

>>23
PDF has an additional con. It sucks for office work, because review and commentary works better when you can just edit a file and add comments. Any half-popular rich text editor supports it as well. diff is an excellent tool, just you need to RTFM.

>>24
I know the difference Adobefags make from "typesetting" to "editing an octet-stream", but I make none. Any operation I perform of my files is octet-stream editing. I want the most versatile high-level and low-level editing. I want to be able to do something useful with the data I have. That's why I prefer it text/plain, but I'll take other things I can process to do something useful with them.

For fuck's sake, not everything can or should be designed with HTML and CSS.
If there's something that, regardless of being possible or not with HTML and CSS, has you thinking about how to do it, then you need to rethink it as a whole: you are doing something wrong. Information should be easy to access and easy to lay out. Easy to access information is easy to lay out. Easily layed out information is almost always easy to access.

By deliberately avoiding PDFs and converting them to text, of which you seem so proud, you have no sense of what a properly typeset article should look like.
Oh, it's not text anymore, it's an article! Fap fap fap lol documents. Fuck that. My "articles" read pretty well in my console. That's right, I even prefer fixed-width fonts to variable-width fonts. But it's just my preference. You want to read tiny Times text with goatse-anus-sized margins? You can. Or you should be able to, if, of course, you can transform text. I'll make it easy by keeping it text/plain.

I will allow you to read text I send to you (becoming YOUR file, not MINE, though it may be my text and my idea) in any way, because I understand and respect your possible need to use gay "designer" fonts and gay "designer" styles. Even if you like Comic Sans MS (lots of "designers" do). Why won't you understand and respect my need to browse my files in my preference?

Also, if you're a "designer", what the fuck are you doing in /prog? Go suck some Adobe cock elsewhere. We're Haskell/Python/Ruby/* trolls here, not "designers".

If you break the formatting of my article and then redistribute it, you make me look like an idiot.
No. If I don't understand your article, then I'm the idiot, not you. And if you used proper formats, then it'd be readable with any display options.

If you change the content of my contract, you can legally fuck me over.
And I can change it in a PDF file too. Except if signed. I can sign text/plain files too.

You've been dealing with text for 20 years, and you get frustrated because you can't edit the PDFs your clients send you.
11 years, and yes, I get frustrated. I'm used to process text files with perl, sed, grep, etc. Anything that allows me to use data in a creative, flexible way. Not a stupid "look mom, it looks like paper lol lol it's eazy lol lol" read-only browser.

>>26
Truth

>>27
HTML and CSS have their place.  That place is in webpages on the internet
Then why do you "designer" fags keep offering PDF shit on MY Internet?

>>30
I'll second that.

>>31
Granted. As long as I get useful delicious plain text I'm ok.

>>32
I'm used to prefix or infix notation, even for complex Maths. I could take other formats though. Not PDF though.

>>29
Interesting idea I'll check that out too thanks.

>>35
Hehe, people like you remind me of the people opposed to blacks. They too have somewhat credible arguments, and a small following, but it's not like they're going to change anything.

Keep fighting though! Personally I'll keep using Acrobat Professional to combine wonderfully typeset LaTeX documents with Encapsulated Postscript versions of Visio diagrams. Mmmm. *fap fap fap fap*

>>37
Keep fapping as long as you keep paying to Adobe for their shit. They'll be pretty happy.

By the way, Adobe, as the guys behind both Postscript and PDF, deserve a Nobel prize for faggotry and fucking with people's right to access and alter their information however they please.

PeDoFiles GTFO!

>>35

lol, you're pretty funny.  Just the fact that you have this distorted sence of ownership despite claiming to be past the age of consent is hilarious.  Work I publish that you read is still my work and you do NOT under any circumstance reserve any sort of "right" or "privledge" to change it from how I want it to be.  If I wanted you to do that I'd make sure to include CC consent.  To put it in terms you MIGHT understand, I am the owner.  You are someone that isn't even in group.  Read-only is retarded and contradictory? chmod -R 777 / and then we'll talk. 

Okay, I'll concede that KPDF can't do regular expressions at the moment(why don't ou fix that?  You're in /prog after all).  But it's really not for things you'd usually need regular expression for anyway (not being an editor, you wouldn't understand this kind of thing- things are corrected before they are typeset and THEN sent to the printers).

You go on to mention that PDF can be hacked.  Well fucking duh! good to see you know one of the most elementary tenets of security.  Moving right along.

The lawyers thing is kind of tricky...you claim that they'll fuck over the criminals in this case, but you finish by including them in a list of other things that are shitty- make up your goddamn mind!  All sarcasm aside, when you live in the real world you understand the concept of things like burden-of-proof (oh, and legal fees).  I won't deny that DRM, DMCA, software patents and the like are a problem, but neither will I fly off the handle like that nutjob Stallman.

Wait...now you're saying that an editor should use comments and diff?  Are you daft?  Don't get me wrong, diff is horribly useful, as are comments, but not in this context.  That aside, people understand a GUI better than a terminal- it took me a while to come to terms with this too; I feel your pain.

Ahh and then you blow it again by completely missing the point of typesetting yet again.  Fine, fine, you're a basement coder, not a publisher or an editor, I get it, but seriously, don't you get tired of being so narrow-minded?  Fine-grained control means nothing if you don't do anything useful with it.  And before you go on about how that's exactly what you said, I want to know: just what "useful" thing do you think you're doing anyway?  Chances are none of it should involve PDF.  You're in /prog, after all.

Once again you demonstrate why you're not a publisher.  Really, stay out of that field- you'll never be successful in it.  You're treating all things as equal and not the purpose.  You can do different things with layout, just as you can modify how writing flows to emphasize or deemphasize certain aspects of the same basic argument.  Remember that my writing is mine, even as you read it, and that your writing belongs exclusively to you (thankfully- you're not the worst, but you're pretty bad).

All right, now we've got a problem- even assuming you got you job at the age of sixteen (unlikely for anything that has "clients" and requires dealing with people in any professional sense), that still makes you twenty-seven- plenty of time to get an education and fit yourself into society as a whole.  Oh yeah, and >>24 is right: you shouldn't be getting PDF if it's interfering with your job- if you let it go on it's indicative of your poor communication skills, not a poor format.  Of course, you're attacking Postscript too, now, so I can't even imagine how large the recovery operation would be to remove your head from your ass.  PS is easlity dealt with in a terminal.

Have a nice day.

you do NOT under any circumstance reserve any sort of "right" or "privledge" to change it from how I want it to be.
What the fuck are you smoking? Of course everyone has the right to do whatever the fuck they want to do with the files on their computer, including viewing and modifying them in any way they wish. Copyright law only puts legal limits on distribution.

And security at the filesystem level is meant to keep other people out of your files, not keep you from using your own damn files! How can you confuse these simple things?

I want to believe you are trolling, but a real troll wouldn't write that much..

>>35
PDF has an additional con. It sucks for office work
Of course it sucks for office work! It's not supposed to be used for office work! For fuck's sake, haven't you been paying attention? We keep telling you that's NOT what PDF is for, and you keep accusing us of wanting to use PDF for everything.

Say I want you to edit my document, and I send you a nice big JPG screenshot of it. Do you get angry at the JPG format because you can't edit it? How is that any different than blaming PDF?

This is what you're doing here. It's not the fault of JPG for being uneditable, just as it's not the fault of PDF for being uneditable. You should be angry at me for sending you the wrong format, and you should be angry at yourself for not properly informing me of what you needed.

Also, if you're a "designer", what the fuck are you doing in /prog? Go suck some Adobe cock elsewhere. We're Haskell/Python/Ruby/* trolls here, not "designers".
I like how you think everyone who likes PDF is a "designer". Hey genius, if you do a CTRL+F on this thread, you'd notice that you're the only one here who says the word "designer".

Many of us are scientists. Computer scientists, computer engineers, physicists... PDF is absolutely vital to publishing papers with any decent formatting at all. You don't have to be a graphics designer to want your paper to look good, but you DO need PDF to publish it electronically.

Now I know you hate PDFs, but grab a decent PDF viewer and take a moment to look at what a decently formatted article looks like:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0703742

Scroll through it for a second. Take a good luck at the math. The computer algorithms. The figures. The data tables. All of this makes the article easy to read.

None of that shit is possible in plaintext. None of that is possible in HTML/CSS (good luck getting math and inset figures looking that good, and being that easy to read, in HTML).

And yes, I really did just go to Arxiv, click Astrophysics->New, and pick the very first article that popped up. It's that easy to find articles that absolutely require PDF to be published.

You want to read tiny Times text with goatse-anus-sized margins? You can.
It's called the zoom tool shithead. I can't even fathom how your brain manages to process the most basic of information.

>>42
LOL YHBT

>>43

If that was some sort of troll attempt, your effort to lulz ratio is fucked.

>>44

If that was some sort of troll attempt, your effort to lulz ratio is fucked.

>>42
Of course it sucks for office work! It's not supposed to be used for office work!
I know (and it's not supposed to be used for anything), but Adobefag >>22 said so.

Say I want you to edit my document, and I send you a nice big JPG screenshot of it. Do you get angry at the JPG format because you can't edit it?
I can tell you are a "designer" fag. You completely ignore that JPEG is NOT for vector drawing, text or screenshots, due to DCT compression. PNG would be the best popular format for that, and it's an open format.

If you sent me a screenshot of the text, it'd be equally as bad. You're sending me shit. Use text for text. I want text. As in text. So give text. As in text. The difference is JPEG has its use for pictures. When you need a matrix of pixels, JPEG doesn't fuck with you (other than being lossy). On the contrary, PDF doesn't have any use. It's bullshit. Perhaps I can grant it'd be ok as a printing format. But I don't print. I use a computer screen, and I don't want to see PDFs on my computer screen.

I like how you think everyone who likes PDF is a "designer".
Yes, you Adobefags are all fancy-glasses trendy-clothes "web designers" or "graphics designers".

Many of us are scientists.
From /sci, possibly.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0703742
HTTP 403 Forbidden. Lol, you fags are so concerned about people stealing your arts/ideas/etc. that you don't even let people access them, rendering them useless. What's next? Partnership with Microsoft for Vista PaperDRM? I come back from lab to say what this shit? You stealing my arts! Perl fags fack you.
(Note: I'm trolling you here. The rest was serious.)

It's called the zoom tool shithead.
Nope, it's called PDF is shit. "Zoom tool" becomes shit because PDF is page-oriented. Pages force a specific layout on my screen which doesn't accomodate to it. If I use "zoom tool", I end up having to scroll horizontally to read. Because page-orientation is shit for fags, text doesn't accomodate properly and portably to the client. Same goes for your goatse-anus-sized margins. Articles articles lol. Wasting my screen. And what if text comes out too big? I can reduce it, but then I'm wasting my screen again, because your gay ass pages have aspect ratios below 1 and text is not rendered according to the User-agent's client width. Also, what's with pages? If you're so concerned about proper layouts, pages force breaks everywhere and they fuck with tables and other stuff.

>>PDF is absolutely vital to publishing papers with any decent formatting at all.

It's called PostScript. Learn to use it, science noobie.

text/plain or image/png or image/jpg or GTFO

more like image/jpeg

Many of us are scientists.
Real scientists use latex.

>>50
real scientists don't have sex.

Oh, that sounds kinky

>>4
Specially now that macs print to them with ease. Bastards. And I like macs. PDF is like a one way Vagina for your edits [here, personified by the penis]. Use it and the contents of the head won't come out for further use :)

>>53
Wow, that must be the worst post ever.  Not only did you compare the PDF to something that doesn't exist (one-way vagina), your metaphor actually makes it HARDER to understand the subject.

>>54
i'm sure >>53 has no idea what a vagina even looks like, so his shitty metaphor is understandable.

>>46
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0703742
HTTP 403 Forbidden. Lol, you fags are so concerned about people stealing your arts/ideas/etc. that you don't even let people access them, rendering them useless.
What the fuck browser are you using? I clicked the link YOU QUOTED and it popped right up. If you're that incompetent, use the link to the abstract instead, and click on PDF:
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0703742

arXiv is a free scientific information repository. There are no arts here, and the whole point is to share ideas. This information is all free of DRM; they almost always include the .tex source, so idiots like you can fuck up the formatting all you want.

Yes, you Adobefags are all fancy-glasses trendy-clothes "web designers" or "graphics designers".
I can't stand Adobe; I genuinely detest their products. I use KPDF to view PDFs, and GIMP and Inkscape for my (rare) graphics editing needs. And no, I'm not a web designer or graphics designer. Fail.

>>50 >>47
LaTeX primarily outputs to PDF, shitheads. DVI is dead, and there isn't a direct path from LaTeX to PS. Plus DVI is not self-contained; there's nothing more irritating than having to extract a tarball before viewing a document. Besides, PDF has extra features that DVI and PS don't support, such as internal linking, so you can e.g. click stuff in the table of contents to hop to the proper section. Plus it's smaller than PS.

LaTeX primarily outputs to PDF, shitheads.
Gyahaha. Just a little worked up are we?

Welcome to 4chan, new guy.

I'm much like the other guy this thread, only i dont really care about certain things.
I belive that all data is free to flow and be modified, i don't belive in any DMCA bullshit and any of that crap. There isn't ANYTHING on my PC's and servers that i cannot modify, if there is something that i cannot modify, i will OPEN UP MAH TRUSTY OLD DEBUGGER AND DISASSEMBLER , reverse enginner it and modify it(if needed of course)..
As for the idiots thinking pdf's are some kind of contracts, thats even more stupid.. yes, if its digitally signed then you cant modify something without breaking the signature(or replacing it), in which case the document woudnt be signed by the original party, so there is a bit of a point here, but if you think that if you disable some rights in PDF's , then some people woudnt be able to modify it, then you are greatly mistaken. It's just data people, bitstreams. You can do anything you fucking want with it.

Now that i have shown that im completly not bothered by any DRM at all, as if i would ever need to defeat it, then i will be able to defeat it. ( Also come on people, im sure there are hundreds utils out there for removing drm from pdf's , its not like its a custom protection system or anything, its quite popular).

As far as PDFs go, i find them an excelelnt format for storing documents/books for print, with good nice typesetting. It looks nice, its easy to read, its flexible for the creators. Standards arent closed either. I dont know the exact status of how good are non-Adobe PDF Readers are out there, but if they arent good enough, its up to them to improve, after all the standard isn't closed.

That said, PDF's ARE FINE TOO and NO they are NOT 'digital documents you cannot change'.

>>56
What the fuck browser are you using? I clicked the link YOU QUOTED and it popped right up.
It works now. It had to have been down for maintenance just when I tried it.

arXiv is a free scientific information repository. There are no arts here, and the whole point is to share ideas. This information is all free of DRM; they almost always include the .tex source, so idiots like you can fuck up the formatting all you want.
YHBT even when I acknowledged that I was trolling you.

GIMP
Ahh, you work with two monitors.

LaTeX primarily outputs to PDF, shitheads.
Lol YHBT.

>>59
Ahh, you work with two monitors.

Yes, actually.

Do you have the same criticism of Photoshop?

>>60
No, I don't have much to say about Photoshop other than it's probably overpriced; haven't tried it myself (using Paint Shop Pro 11 for my needs), so I shouldn't be talking about it.

WHBTC

Your window mousey hair   I heard you   singing in the   img tag and   search a basic   interpreter has ever   been created using   anything other than   VIM or Emacs   Or MSVC ew   How hard it   tries to be   part of this   syntax highlighting which   I cannot see   failed to figure   out how to   quote so I   pronounce it C   compiler with matching   chopstick holder WITH   chopsticks OH and   it CANNOT have   any cartoon pictures   or be made.

Bringing /prog/ back to its people
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

Somebody

Somewhere

Just
Check
Them

Roll your own