John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes
Note 1851
Though, at the xx51st Note, I usually comment on the purpose of the Notes, I have discussed recently the notes in relationship to other publications and sources of information. Rather, in this note I thought that I would comment on how information is to be distributed in this electronic age.
Adobe Systems, Inc., some time ago, saw that the ability to distribute information was a crucial problem. This meant that one had to have the ability to input information from a variety of sources and to distribute it by some means that all users of computers could read. They developed what they have called the Portable Document Format abbreviated PDF. To read records written in this format, a special program, which they call the
Reader
, is required. To make the PDF format popular, they give away this Reader program. So far, they claim to have given away more than 500 million copies of the Reader. They sell (for a significant price) the program that generates the PDF programs.
There are different varieties of the Reader. There is one program for IBM PCs (i.e., what we generally call PCs). There is another program for MacIntosh computers. The full Reader program for PCs is 12 million bytes. The full Reader program for MacIntosh computers is 16 million bytes. (Whether they have Readers for Unix and Linux is unknown to me.) Using the Reader that is appropriate for the computer that it resides on, it should be possible to take a common set of input data and to display it.
Over the course of time, the Reader programs have evolved as new features have been added. Thus, we went from Reader 1 to Reader 2 and to the present Reader 6. Each of these appears in different forms for different types of computers.
Some of the people with MacIntosh computers had trouble reading the
Beyond Germanna CD
that was prepared to Adobe's specification by their creator program. I am wondering if the users have the correct reader because Adobe is advertising that with the correct program any document prepared by them can be read. If one person has a modern MacIntosh with the MacIntosh Reader 6 program, I will be pleased to send them the CD to test. I would like to get to the root of the difficulty (there may be none, but some questions exist).
The types of documents that Adobe undertakes to convert to the PDF are a challenge. They will take printed input; the output of electronic programs such as Word or even Excel; or the material which appears on the Internet. There is a variety of media and format and rules, and they claim to be able to prepare a document that can be read and searched by anyone. We will talk a little more about how they appear to do this.
(18 Mar 04)