https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c2
--- Comment #2 from Roland Hughes 2011-11-24 14:28:29 UTC ---
I have run into Mike Sweet before. You can take what he knows about IT, pour
it into a sewing thimble, and suddenly find room to park seven 18 wheelers.
This brainiac swears computers with serial and parallel ports haven't been sold
in years, yet 10 minutes searching Microcenter's Web site found no less than 30
computers and motherboards for sale containing at least one of those ports.
Either later today or tomorrow I will be cutting and pasting his illuminating
posts over on the AARP forums where he can find out what life is like when
50+million retired people who have nothing better to do all day than follow him
around on-line is like,
Printing is no fun because people like Mike, who know absolutely nothing about
the industry, make the decisions.
I've been a published author for multiple decades now, AND I have over 20 years
in IT. I was there when PDF came about and I can tell you it CAUSES MORE
PROBLEMS THAN IT SOLVES. When a print shop requests a PDF from me I know for a
fact they have minimum wage (or less) workers doing their pre-flight. PDF is
quite popular with POD operations, but high end ink printers still demand
multiple proofs if you want to work with that format.
You have to actually know IT history to understand why PDF is bad.
BASIC has an ANSI standard and was supposed to be the first "portable" language
students learned. I defy anyone here to port a non-trivial VAX BASIC program
to Quick BASIC and then Visual Basic.
COBOL has an ANSI standard and was supposed to be the first "portable" business
language. I defy anyone here to port a nontrivial IBM mainframe COBOL program
to ACCU-COBOL and then to MicroFocus COBOL.
C has an ANSI standard and was billed as the first truly "portable" language.
What a laugh that turned out to be, especially thanks to BORLAND and every
other PC compiler adding their own "extensions".
PDF = Portable Document Format
There is no ANSI standard because PDF is a GUIDELINE. It is THE poorest choice
for printing input you could ever make.
BTW, I've written two books on Qt which are now ready for editing. The
"default" output from a QTextDocumentWriter is ODF. You have to manually force
PDF, Postscript, or any other file format. ODF, like its predecessor in the Qt
world RTF, is inherently non-portable. KOffice, AbiWord, LibreOffice, and
IBM's Lotus Symphony will all render the same file differently on the exact
same machine. It will be even worse on other machines due to the lack of
common fonts and a common cross platform rendering engine.
PDF has similar problems. Yes, the document has been converted to an "image"
to some extent, it still requires a rendering engine and those engines are ALL
different. Not only that, but they REQUIRE accurate information to come back
from the printer drivers.
Take a look at the 2 png files I'm attaching. This is the exact same printer
using the Generic Postscript level 2 printer driver. One section is able to
obtain the resolution and the other is not. If your PDF rendering engine uses
the resolution value (which most try to) consider yourself pooched!
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