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While I have often heard the same environmental spiel, I have been in the
real arguments to go PDF (no doubt you all have too) and trees never enter
into the discussion. Its money and who spends it. PDFs save the company
money and let the consumer spend the money to print the manuals, etc...
However, marketing can then say that trees are being saved, wink, wink,
nudge, nudge.
And to add a thought for those of us who predate laser printers...
My paper use skyrocketed with laser printers. I could print off a page and
it would be there before I could walk to the computer room (o, the old
days). I loved it and took advantage of it. Before the laser printer, it
would take 16 hours or so to print the OS manual sets on a high-speed daisy
wheel printer, unless I wanted to change fonts. So I rarely printed manuals
in their entirety, just a page here and a page there.
It took me 10 years to wean me off of the laser printer ( a larger monitor
helped). Interestingly enough, my example seems to rub off on the new staff.
We have 7 writers here and on the whole, I think the engineers print more
than we do. AND, it is very apparent when we hire a new writer: our paper
throughput spikes for a month and then its back to normal. The new writers
often have commented that we don't keep printing drafts (maybe its the size
of the manuals we typically work with). Anyway, we don't print that much. I
don't print PDF's unless I have no source and want to do a hard edit.
However, it has taken me a long time being constantly immersed in this
"paper issue" to get to the point where I don't print much.
I think most people are still printing like there are millions of trees just
dying to be books.
A landmark hotel, one of America's most beautiful cities, and
three and a half days of immersion in the state of the art:
IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
+++ Miramo -- Database/XML publishing automation. See us at +++
+++ Seybold SFO, Sept. 25-27, in the Adobe Partners Pavilion +++
+++ More info: http://www.axialinfo.comhttp://www.miramo.com +++
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