text to pdf to email

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Tue, 10 May 2005, Bill Campbell wrote:

> >Do you get out in the real world much, Bill?
>
> Once in a while (when I can get out of my office where I support ISPs from
> Washington State to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a few of which are
> running e-mail for their customers :-).
>
> >Below my sig is a text report. Using Pine on Linux I attached it to the
> >end of my email. How does it look? Do the linedraw characters come out
> >right? Do you see the 125-column layout properly represented? Can you
> >print it properly if you need to?
>
> It doesn't look like much on the FreeBSD system where I'm reading this e-
> mail since I don't have acroread installed on that box.  In my Real World,
> I often have to read mail from a variety of platforms, some of which are
> lacking in much graphics support.  I can always use Thunderbird, Sylpheed,
> or other GUI mailer, but they are much slower than mutt which is my
> preferred MUA.

In the real world, more than 95% of the recipients of email use a
graphically based email client with graphical printing capability. What
percent use Mutt? What percent are willing to change their client
software's character width in order to see their accounting report
properly? In what percent of them would the linedraw characters come out
properly?

>
> >For comparison, there is also attached a PDF version of the same file.
> >Take a look. I could have specified margins, of course.
> >
> >Note that in this demonstration I haven't even approached:
> >
> >a) pagination
> >b) accented characters
> >c) embedded tabs
> >d) backspace bolding
> >e) backspace underlining
> >f) page orientation
> >g) character pitch changes
> >h) line overstrike
>
> None of which are particularly standard for printers, much lest e-mail
> clients.  I would argue that most of these make e-mail less readable, not
> more, particularly for those of use who may not have 18-year old 20/20
> vision.  If you really want to make things illegible, you could use fancy
> color highlighting which often reduces the contrast between text sections.

But I'm talking about PRINTING. Pagination is fairly common, don't you
think? Isn't it nice when the page heading actually comes out at the top
of the page?

> ...
> The accounting software I've developed uses groff and encapsulated
> PostScript(tm) to create invoices, purchase orders, etc., as PostScript
> which is then sent directly to the printer.  When I need to convert these
> so that those with brain-dead systems that don't understand PostScript,
> ps2pdf does the trick.  I was at a presentation a couple of weeks ago when
> somebody was talking about SQL-ledger which uses LaTeX to do much the same
> thing for fancier reports.  If you want to get down to it, LaTeX can
> produce far better looking documents than anything I've seen under the
> Microsoft virus, Windows.

What percent of email recipients can print PostScript? Calling their
systems brain dead doesn't help solve the problem.

>
> The quoted text below is your ``readable'' text.

It's not readable in my email! And did you try printing it?

My point is simply this: many people have a real world need to email
reports, such as those generated by filePro, to recipients with a wide
range of email clients, who need to print them. They need the lines to be
the proper width, not wrapped or cut off, and the pages to break at the
proper place. They MAY need to get fancier than that. PDF is the best
current solution to this problem.

The original request was perfectly reasonable.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
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