Re: gnats/263

[Yngve Svendsen]

At 21:55 07.12.01 +0100, Milan Zamazal wrote:
> We shouldn't be so much generous, since this would make the distribution
> significantly larger.  I think we should include Info; PostScript and
> HTML are under consideration, there is no point in inclusion of DVI and
> PDF, IMHO.

The fact that the distribution would be larger is a valid point, but I 
think the case for including PDF is strong (DVI isn't very important, since 
it for most purposes is simply a step in the creation of a Postscript 
file), since Info and Postscript are cumbersome formats to handle when you 
aren't on a Linux / UNIX platform. Very few Windows machines have software 
installed that allows Postscript viewing on-sceen, and even sending a 
Postscript file to the printer from a Windows machine is a challenge. Thus, 
I'd ask you to reconsider, and if PDF isn't included we should at the very 
least provide a downloadable version from the GNU website. A raw PDF 
created from the current manual runs at 365kB gzipped, but I believe that 
running it through an optimization in Adobe Acrobat should reduce the size 
significantly.

- Yngve