[Edu-sig] Things to come

[Steve Morris]

Jeffrey Elkner writes:
 > If anyone has any time on their hands and wants to help out, it would be a big
 > help to me if we could get the livewires course materials put into some web
 > ready format.

Does anyone else wish that people would stop publishing things in .pdf
format. It is the second most user unfriendly way of distributing
information electronically, second only to bitmap images. The content
is no longer available in any form except graphically. You can't even
do a text search to find relevent sections. pdf is a compressed and
scalable way of distributing graphics that might incidentally contain
fonts.

Actually there are tools that attempt to strip text out of pdf files
but the results are indifferent for any but the simplest files. It is
usually slightly better than OCR'ing scanned images.