User:Ssstephen/Reading/Near Print and Beyond Paper
< User:Ssstephen | Reading
PDfs variously partake of the form and fixity of print that other digital text formats frequently do not.
The “look of printedness,” as I have called it, has been separated from paper and mobilized online, even in the process of producing printed books.
[PDFs] render
Its just a normal PDF.
Finally, and at Adobe’s instigation, PDf 1.7 was adopted as an open standard by the International Standards Organization in 2008
This would be interesting to study further as an event, what is the context, who were the actors, what were their motivations.
The fixity of print
the New York Times Information Bank—another fascinating, short-lived experiment—tried the same kind of thing, but fiche retrieval proved so unreliable that eventually “a person wearing white gloves pulled fiche on demand” and positioned it in front of a video camera.
Tabs opened while reading
WYSIWYG WYS>WYG WYS<WYG WYS%WYG WYS&WYG WYS|WYG
folding, smelling, tearing, crumpling, shuffling, and wiping
PDfs are indi-vidually bounded and distinct.
Can a PDF be in itself?
If it is a common-place today that words and images and sounds are closer together than they have ever been before—now that all of them come as data strings, in bits and bytes—nonetheless there are important ways that “as compu-tational data structures, images differ radically and fundamentally from electronic text.”85 The big difference, as Kirschenbaum explains, is that unlike digital text, “images remain largely opaque to the algorithmic eyes of the machine.”
9 Not quite text (from a reader’s standpoint) and not entirely image (at the scanner), barcodes like these require a fixity that makes them perfect content for PDfs as well as for paper. So the document persists.
What is the difference between "Portable Document Format Reference Manual" by Adobe Systems and "Beyond Paper: The Official Guide to Adobe Acrobat" by Patrick Ames?