hgbook on bitbucket; was: hgbook is broken?

Doug Philips dgou at mac.com
Wed Feb 11 17:00:48 CST 2009


On or about Wednesday, February 11, 2009, at 05:30PM, Peter Hosey indited:
>Yes, if you expect to support linking to a specific chapter, not just  
>the whole book. (Or are you proposing a PDF for every chapter?)

I'm not saying, just pointing out that HTML has its costs too.

>Also, the HTML will be smaller than even a well-tuned PDF, and good  
>HTML is instantly accessible to screen readers, whereas PDF may  
>require some hand-holding. (I base the latter statement on what I've  
>read of the Google results for ?pdf accessibility?.)

I doubt that there is such a thing as good HTML that has any kind of style.
Even corporate drones who don't "understand computers" know how to deal with PDF files.

>One final point: There are, presumably, a lot of existing links to  
>parts of the HTML version of the hg book. If you delete the HTML  
>version, these links break.

That is a reasonable counter argument. Have to think on that...

>Firefox and Internet Explorer support PDF?

Well, FireFox 2 and FireFox 3 on Windows XP and Mac OS X do. I haven't run a plain Linux system in long enough to know for sure, but I would bet that they can handle it as well.

>Alternative question: Does Adobe's Acrobat Reader browser plug-in not  
>suck like a black hole full of vacuum cleaners on Windows and Linux as  
>it did on the Mac?

Guess it has been a while since you used it on a Mac. I've had decent results as indicated above.

-Doug



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