From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Mar 3 02:54:31 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id CAA21217 for freebsd-chat-outgoing; Tue, 3 Mar 1998 02:54:31 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from internationalschool.co.uk ([194.72.37.214]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id CAA21205 for ; Tue, 3 Mar 1998 02:54:22 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from stuart@internationalschool.co.uk) Received: from internationalschool.co.uk (bamboo.tis [192.168.0.81]) by internationalschool.co.uk (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA20326 for ; Tue, 3 Mar 1998 10:51:53 GMT Message-ID: <34FBE0CB.C1697F2D@internationalschool.co.uk> Date: Tue, 03 Mar 1998 10:51:55 +0000 From: stuart henderson X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win95; U) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ps2pdf (was: newbies mailing list) References: <199803030441.VAA11558@const.> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > IMHO, HTML is the best choice for this documentation. HTML is > accessible from nearly everywhere, space efficient and by definition, > hypertext. > If a plain text version is necessary for ease of printing and access > where a browser isn't available, use the existing SGML tools to > produce HTML and text from one base. At the moment, it's not very easy to get at the handbook or FAQ offline until FreeBSD is installed. It would probably be more useful for many people to be able to read it first - certainly in countries where phone calls have to be paid for, online reading isn't a very sensible option. I think at the very least, there should be a (preferably .zip) archive of the HTML versions for offline reading. A printable version as well would be nice: .ps is not a very good choice because very few people in the Windows world know about ghostscript - RTF/Word/PDF all have the advantage of being printer-independent and usable on a reasonably standard configuration. Plain text is so simple that it will probably confuse most people used to Windows software (who I imagine will load it into a WP, which will re-render it in variable width and quite likely munge things so that when they try to print it from the WP, which I am sure they will do!, the page numbers don't tally with the pages). You can't expect a lot of them to consider printing it directly until *after* they've used UNIX for a while (bearing in mind that a lot of people these days won't even have seen a C:\> prompt). :-) :-) Stuart To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message