Brendan wrote:Why is it harder to print HTML files than it is to print PDF files?
As the PDF format is device independant a printout will look just like the onscreen document. The vast majority of HTML documents on the other hand already start to "disintegrate" as soon as the screen resolution gets changed
Brendan wrote:I did do a little research though, and found that PDF has become more "open" than it used to be - out of 7 patents only one of them restricts other developers (and only if they're writing code that reads or converts PDF files - generating PDF files is OK)
Adobe plans to release the PDF format as a ISO standard (link) which includes that they won't sue anybody trying to implement the standard
I decided to test if there is a compression difference between HTML and PDF. I use the tool Doxygen to produce source documentation for my kernel. My kernel source is nothing great, but the reason I am using it is because it is rather large.
Generating a PDF is:
4,692,573 when in plain PDF.
2,382,301 when compressed with BZ2.
Generating HTML is:
12,810,240 when all files are combined using TAR.
1,590,253 when compressed with BZ2.
The only problem is that after downloading my .tar.bz2 archive of the html directory I have no idea how to print everything in the correct order and remove the file:///home/kmcguire/solar/plain/docs/doxy/html/floppy__generic_8c.html type headers from the top. It is also with out page numbers for the entire set instead it only produces page numbers per document.
I hope no one would print my source documentation unless it is really that helpful since it is rather large but just to pretend it was great I think it could produce a rather complex inconvenience to print rather than just downloading my PDF and using that for printing and the online HTML for selective viewing.
