desired effects to be achieved. From this point of view, PostScript is good and PDF is better. Both have long-established publically available standards, and all sorts of software can generate good instances of them, and I am not aware of any real limitation on producing either good PS or good PDF, using Free Software, which may be related to Adobe's proprietary stance.

In my view, exactly the same principles apply to viewers etc. If someone writes a good PDF viewer which renders the GPL-generated PDF I and others produce as well as Reader does, that's fine. But so long as the existing GPL'd viewers don't, that's too bad and I will patiently wait till the skilled developers of these things get it right. Meanwhile, I'll be using Reader.

BTW, this situation is not unique to PDF and Reader. The same applies, more subtly, to PS. Ghostscript is a case in point: its fonts are not Adobe fonts, and differ subtly. My printer (Brother HL-1070) is a "PostScript" printer (in that I can send it raw PS and get a good printout); but in fact it uses "BrotherScript" which is a PostScript emulation and in particular the fonts, again, are subtly different (to the extent that I have to tweak certin things in my software to get some characters to print where I want them to); and this is so that Brother don't have to pay Adobe a royalty for using true Adobe fonts.

However, if I had to produce camera-ready copy for a publisher, who insisted (for design reasons) on particular proprietary fonts, then I'd pay for those fonts. And hope that the results (generated by GPL'd software) would be sufficiently impressive to scoop yet another handful of earth from beneath that wall!

All the best, Ted.

[1] "Patience, fleas. The night is long". (Spanish proverb, allegedly; per Ernest Hemingway).

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