Re: Warnock's speech

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 04:56 PM 11/5/99 -0500, Larry Kollar wrote:
>Dan Emory wrote:
>
>>Anyone who believes that reading complex information on a computer monitor
>>is better than reading it in a well designed book is severely twisted, and
>>that's never going to change. One does not carefully read and reread
>>something serious or complex or important on a computer screen.
>
>I wouldn't say "never," but the technology has to be developed first. I
>think it'll take screen resolutions of at least 200 dpi before electronic
>books become practical; more likely 300 dpi -- and they'll need to be
>dirt-cheap. I'm not holding my breath.
>
>>Brad, in his never-ending feverish greed, made that point by depriving us
>>all of the capability to print Warnock's speech....
>
>At least he made it available, and how would he know if you printed it?
>In my case, as well as yours, I simply read it on-line though. And even
>though Brad copyrighted it, he allowed downloads. (Like you said, the
>content of the speech was such that anyone buying a tape would have
>felt rooked. :-)
====================================================================
Brad set up the PDF file so it can't be printed. Brad thinks (as do I) that
the proprietary value lies inherently in the ability to print the document
out on that antiquated (by Warnock's description) medium of paper.
Clearly anyone who downloads the PDF can send it electronically to anyone
else, but no one can print it, even with Exchange. By not allowing the
document to be printed, Brad has assured that only a few will read the
speech carefully for all the subtleties of meaning (if any) contained
therein. By so doing, he refutes the most basic argument Warnock made in his
speech.

It was also irritating the way Warnock off-handedly dealt with XML. He
muddied up the waters, and ignored the most fundamental advantage of XML,
namely, the fact that it is designed to be readable by software applications
and machines as well at humans. Obviously, he doesn't want to publicly
acknowledge that XML browsers are likely to substantially erode the Acrobat
installed base. He also made some senseless, inane, and derogatory comments
about Unicode, which, I gather, will not be fully implemented in the next
release of FrameMaker.
======================================================================== 
>>Doing serious reading on the web is an oxymoron. The web is the domain of
>>the Ritalin-deprived. FrameMaker is designed to produce documents to be read
>>by those who aren't. What I got from Warnock's talk is that Frame products
>>don't fit that well into Adobe's master plan for delivering content to the
>>Attention-Deficit-Disordered masses.
>
>Well, there's an implied generalization to all current electronic
>documents... Unix users have been using manpages for about 30 years now.
>Sure they're clunky, but they're lowest common denominator and have
>served a purpose. For brief reference material, reading from a browser
>is fine. But yeah, it's mostly entertainment or news.
==================================================================
I loved Man documents when I was on Unix platforms (cumulatively about 7 years).
But I almost always printed them out before trying to read them carefully.
The point I was trying to make related to Warnock's repeated boasting about
how close Adobe was to being a paperless environment, as though printing an
electronic document was some kind of sin against the company. Perhaps this
policy attracts employees with attention deficit disorder, which may explain
some of the problems we've been experiencing from Adobe. What else other
than ADD could explain the recent Adobe survey about Acrobat, which asked
the respondents to identify the DTP software products they used to produce
PDFs? FrameMaker, an Adobe product after all, was omitted from the checklist.
========================================================================
>PDF is becoming a kind of standard for longer documents accessible on
>the web. I tend to print out the parts I want to keep -- and if I have
>to spend a few cents on my laser printer, it's quicker and much cheaper
>than buying a pre-printed book. FrameMaker will continue to be the
>top-tier PDF creation tool, at least until something better comes along.
>Again, I'm not holding my breath.
=====================================================================
It still continues to gall me that all of FrameMaker's robust hyperlink
capabilities are not duplicatable in Acrobat. Yet Adobe has, for all intents
and purposes, dropped the FrameViewer product. Acrobat should be capable of
implementing all of the hypertext commands that can be produced by
FrameMaker, as well as those which will be available in XML.
     ====================
     | Nullius in Verba |
     ====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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