[IPOL discuss] Ipol articles

[Nicolas Limare]

> My question is: why bother to create a pdf viewer when there are so many of
> them (e.g. the Adobe Acrobat) freely available?

Adobe Acrobat may not be installed on some machines with a strict
"free software policy". In that case, other PDF readers will always be
available, but may not be configures as a browser plugin. So, the
question probably is "why do we want to watch the PDF in the browser,
and not in an external program". The answer may be that using an
external software disrupt the navigation flow: once in the external
reader, there is no more "back button", no more browser tabs, ...

But I am not sure this is a convincing argument.

> From the reader's point of view, wouldn't it be possible to get a
> printable (pdf) version from the current wiki page (maybe including
> some directives that specify what to print and what not from the
> html file) ?

I did that recently, with the `wkhtmltopdf` program. The result is
attached to this message. It produces visually good pdf versions of
a web page, but the typographic quality is still much lower than with
a document produced with LaTeX. And these PDFs are not clickable.

-- 
Nicolas LIMARE - CMLA - ENS Cachan    http://www.cmla.ens-cachan.fr/~limare/
IPOL - image processing on line                          http://www.ipol.im/
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