On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:13:06 -0500, the infamous "J. Clarke"
scrawled the following:

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.

I started with a screaming fast modem, 1,200 baud. I remember
marveling at the zoomy 1-character-per-second speed, yelonblk text
showing on the huge 14" monitor! Thank Crom that's no longer the
norm. Can you imagine having to download these huge spams at that
speed, paying for phone time the whole way? There'd have been
lynchings. (IMHO, there still should be.)


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

AFAIC, it still is. Searching for stray characters it misses takes
longer than retyping the page.

--
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire,
you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
-- George Bernard Shaw