Steve wrote:
On 2010-01-30 19:26:49 -0500, Dave Balderstone
said:

PDF has its place, but the web isn't it.

Not for display online, perhaps, but it's remarkably efficient for
transporting gobs of data, even it that data began as TIFFs. I was
able to download a 400+ -page book yesterday, OCR it, and have a
searchable file in about a half-hour. How long would it have taken to
page through a paper document? How long would it have taken to page
through the PDF? A lot longer than the searchable PDF, though the
paper document would have have been quicker than non-searchable PDF.

But enough of this -- let's go make sawdust!

Broadband has made PDFs much more useful, but a lot of us have not-fond
memories of having do download some immense file over a 300 baud connection,
in its entirety, before we could begin looking for the one lousy line of
information we needed.

And OCR? That was worthless until desktops hit Cray speed.