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I agree that PDF is not as limited as many people believe, but
unfortunately it can require a lot of knowledge and research to get what
you're looking for.
There is another limitation to PDF that no one has mentioned yet--the
cultural limitation. People like us (tech writers) who deal in documents
and formats take PDF as second nature, but there are still many people out
there working in administrative capacities who either have never heard of
PDF, or at least don't know how to view one.
A few years ago I sent in a PDF of my resume to a hotshot dot-com and was
accepted for an interview. I was horrified to see that the people
interviewing me were reading my resume from badly mangled ASCII text
printed on paper, as if the person who recieved the CV had somehow copied
the text out of the PDF, pasted it into NOTEPAD, and had printed it without
even repairing the formatting glitches.
Then, one day a technical recruiter convinced me to send in a resume, and
when I sent it in PDF he replied with "I can't read that file. Can you send
it in Word?" (I don't think it was a smokescreen--he really had no idea was
a PDF was.)
I suppose that's a bit OT, but worth mentioning, methinks.
e
d
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ed Hawco
Senior Technical/Marketing Writer
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