Tech Magazines going electronic.

Are you talking about embedding URLs in the PDF document to call home to the Author? Or that Adobe gives that capability to the author of a page? If so I didn't know about the latter. Either way I can shut my firewall while reading documents I don't trust. I worry about other capabilities of HTML. It seems like part of the way towards a programming language and I don't know how much of the way it really is.

Robert

I wouldn't understand some of these in depth reports myself. But it is always interesting and challenging to study such articles to understand out how the other half sees the world. I miss some of the more practical articles on subjects like how to determine friction force of pneumatic-hydraulic seals, sizing servo drives, sizing electric motors for variable power demands, coupler torsional stiffness verses servo resolution, best practices for applying fasteners in different design applications, sizing clutches and brakes, sizing cooling systems for electrical cabinets, sizing pneumatic systems to achieve desired response time of actuators, sizing and principles of designing with U-Joints, payback and net present value, how to determine and derive the correct geometry for locating pins, etc....

All of this information can be found in some obscure engineering reference or manufacturer's engineering information section. However, the trade magazines always brought these interesting topics to the reader on a regular basis. Of course, engineers also used to have more time to kick back and learn about these topics on the companies dime. Also, pretty much gone

Yet this was how things were done and

The underlying principles and mathematics necessary to derive the solutions are buried in user friendly software and overly simplified for the masses.

However, I do like spell check ;>)

Someone in our organization was recently broadcasting how they could instantly save the company barrels of money by replacing all the company desktop systems with laptops. He authoritively pronounced the return on investment would be less than one year based upon energy savings alone. When asked if he took into account corporate tax rate, depreciation value, salvage value, he looked puzzled and asked how this information was relevant. Going back to your hypothesis, simple is dangerous or even fatal in the hands of wannabes who don't understand the underlying principles.

All shades of blue means not to worry, right :-)

Sometimes it seems like too many companies prefer soccer mom's driving SUV's

Kman

Looks good. But how do I get it to open PDFs in my FF browser please?

So do I, but the same principles hold there as well. Don't you love seeing the misspelled words where the writer didn't know that the spell checker gave him the write spelling for the wrong word?

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

I loaded it. However (and it may be coincidence) the next time I started up the computer I found all my nVidia drivers wiped out.

Dirk

The Consensus:- The political party for the new millenium

Both, if I understand your first question.

If so I

As you can with html. But with a modern browser you don't need to.

I worry about other capabilities of HTML.

Html is a text markup language, and that's it. Period. It's the other things, javascript, java, visual basic, etc, that do the damage if you let them. Adobe reader now supports javascript, just like html. But Adobe Reader doesn't let you turn off javascript. Modern web browsers do.

John Perry

I sure hope it *was* a coincidence, as I too have nVidia drivers.

Some other weird s*it seems to be happening. I hope it hasn't screwed the registry.

Or in my case, leave in an extra word left over from the previous rewrite. Microsoft would really help me out if they would add a "gray cell" (i.e. old fart) spell checker.

Kman

Doesn't the Acrobat browser plug in work for you?

Guess so When they mail out those annoying little packets of advertisement cards you might guess where I archive them.

Kman

I've been using it for a while, because Adobe is so bad. It has definite faults though: its display quality is poor, and it has real problems sizing and printing pages that don't match the format of the original. It also crashes fairly regularly when it prints.

Paul Burke

IT

And the lack of integration with Firefox I described earlier.

Yes, but the point was to replace that with Foxit.

Elsewhere, I've just been pointed to this explanation:

Seems Foxit requires me to uninstall Adobe Acrobat before I can get Foxit to integrate with FF (and then it opens PDFs only in a new window, rather than a new tab).

If you qualify that as **multi-page schematics**, a reluctant Yes. A single-page PNG would just get bigger with the PDF wrapper/

...then there's the

Vaguely related: The state of Massachusetts is contemplating dumping Microsoft Office unless it starts natively supporting their two selected document formats: PDF and OpenDocument. The later I can see, but my impression was that although lower versions of PDF were public standards that anyone was free to use, the later versions are proprietary to Adobe and they don't hand out the full document description under the guise of needing to maintain 'security by obscurity' for their digital rights management technology... in which case Adobe and PDF really don't seem that much better than Word. Anyone know for certain?

Heh. Interesting you should mention that:

You mean like M$ APIs? 8-) All the imperfect implementations of 3rd-party readers would seem to bear that out. . .

I think it depends on what your definition of "is" is (or "open" or "free"): http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:X7Xt4_xDp7kJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format+pdf-is-an-open-standard+royalty-free+Free-readers-for-many-platforms