Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops [LWN.net]

Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops

Posted Jan 12, 2012 18:00 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)
In reply to: Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops by tetromino
Parent article: Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops

And of course, Akcaagac's proposal to use PDF—slow-to-render, paginated, optimized for printing on dead trees—as the default documentation format was, quite bluntly, insane.
I won't touch the rest of your comment, but I have to say that in my experience PDF works better than other formats currently available for documentation. Pagination is an advantage, or at worst does no harm. Being able to print from it is also an advantage, although a rarely-used one. The only downside I see is that it's a derived format. You still have to maintain the original source for the documentation in some other format.

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Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops

Posted Jan 12, 2012 19:06 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

the big disadvantage of pdf is that you can't reflow the text to match your screen/font size.

having documentation on an e-reader (kindle/nook) can be a great thing, if your documentation is only in pdf, this is a problem

Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops

Posted Jan 13, 2012 14:16 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Also, there are readers for e-book formats for desktop Linux as well. (They probably require ripping out of Calibre by the roots, though.)

e-book formats are not ideal, but they're a lot better for reading text than PDF ever was. The *readers* are not ideal, but just because the Kindle doesn't do Tex-style autohyphenation (or break on hyphens at all) doesn't mean that a desktop e-book reader cannot.

Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops

Posted Jan 14, 2012 19:46 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Try FBReader - it works great on mobile phones/readers and it does autohyphenation (based on locale settings).