On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:43 PM, Tore Anderson <tore@fud.no> wrote:
It was just one example. Another would be ripe-566, which has a couple of tables. Sure, you can create an ASCII art tables, but doing so and at the same time everything below 72 characters of width might not be easiest thing in the world. A future document might want to include some other figures or other external content which cannot be (easily) represented in plain text.
The various TeX flavors can generate PDF/A. I understand that this would add complexity for people who need to create PDFs. Which may be a benefit overall as this would result in a stronger incentive to use plain text. All this while still allowing easily diffed collaboration on text files in all cases.
Because once that PDF is the authoritative version it's hard for someone else to come along and make changes to it later.
Fair point; see above.
Reasonably, if you keep the amount of markup to a minimum. The point after all isn't to get RIPE documents that are glitzy AJAX Web2.0 HTML5 interactive stuff, just to allow for the inclusion of basic figures, tables, images and a minimum of formatting.
Even then, fonts may get lost over time; that will not happen with PDF/A which embeds all fonts. I am not saying we need eternal docs that always look the same, but it would be nice to have and as we are debating redoing things anyway.... Richard