Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1489

I

Richard Steiner

Or, more frequently, the differences are not handled automatically (or the automatic handling is wrong), and one has to run the files through a conversion utility or muck with them in an editor to fix them. In my view, that falls squarely within the definition of "non-portable".

I use a wide variety of platforms concurrently today, having been a Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Windows, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, OS-8, RSTS-E, ADIOS, TRS-DOS, NewDOS-80, OS-65-D, DiskMon, SunOS, Domain, and sometimes Solaris user over a period of many years, and text files have always been and continue to be an issue. A minor issue, perhaps, but one that I still have to routinely deal with.

If ASCII text files are a portable standard, where is the standards document that defines the format (not just the character set)? Answer: there is none. Therefore there is no software that is compatible with the standard. Kinda hard to claim any sort of portability for that.

That doesn't make the PDF file format any less open. It's hardly Adobe's fault if OS2200 and TSO don't have enough market share to justify anyone offering a PDF reader application that runs on them.

In any case, I can't imagine that I'd even *want* a PDF reader that ran on TSO. I'd be accessing TSO from a PC, so I'd just run the PDF reader on that.

Well, get a better reader for OS-2. Again, the fact that there are obscure platforms that don't have PDF readers doesn't make the PDF format any less open.

Having actual working software is of little value when the format is closed. There are programs to process PDF files on a whole lot more platforms than there are programs to process Microsoft Word files.

So? Quit complaining and write one, or pay someone to write one.

I seem to recall that there was a port of Ghostscript for OS-2 at one point. It's probably not up to date, but if you really need it I'm sure you can use it as a basis and sync up to the latest code.

Eric