Note: Curriki gets bonus points for having the most convoluted search strings.
PDF Is Not An Open Or Reusable Format
Related posts
- Using Open Content To Drive Educational Change
- Open Content, Where You Want It, In A Space You Control
- Building a Student Portal -- Response to a Question from Miguel Guhlin
- Notes From Educon Session: Crowdsourcing The Death Of The Textbook
- When We Talk About Open Content, This Is What We Talk About
Recent Blog Posts
- Bullying: One Kid Talking To Another About Not Taking A Test
- How Common Core Should Be Rolled Out
- Parent Information Night On The Common Core
- Hiding Behind Metadata
- How Are Schools Using Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook Explaining Surveillance?
- How Can We Teach Privacy?
- Re-usable content, back to the basics, and knowing your tools
- I Have Some Word Docs...
- If We Need Data, Who Collects It?
- Questions On Data Collection and the Common Core
Blog posts and documentation licensed under a BY SA license.
For additional details, see the About Our Documentation page.
Comments
pdf is an open format
I understand the reusable part but not the open.
http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=51502
OINO
I'd say that PDFs are open in name only.
While the standard is available (and a real bargain at just under $400 US at the link above), using PDFs is an unnecessarily limited format to use for data.
Given other open formats, the ease with which they can be created, and their superiority for reuse, I have a difficult time understanding why someone creating "open" content would encumber that content within a PDF.
Because InDesign doesn't generate any other formats well
With Writing Spaces, Bill, I would loosely guess that we probably spend at least 50 human hours in prepping the manuscript for InDesign, formatting the manuscript in InDesign, and final proofing and correcting. At that point, we have used the publishing industry standard tool for creating a document ready for print (there is no better), and we send off a PDF to the printer. It's only five more minutes to adjust the PDF output for a version for sharing on the web. On the other hand, InDesign doesn't export a text well in any other format. So to then produce a different version of the manuscript means a lot more time. So I suspect in some instances that people are preparing texts in desktop publishing and PDF is the optimal solution for sharing what is produced.
Recently, our publisher attended a webinar by O'Reilly Media where they discussed how time consuming it has been for them to design XML templates and style sheets so that they can output their texts for various media. So from a publishing standpoint, it's not a trivial issue to work in other formats when the goal is to produce print versions.
pdf definitely isn't reusable
I'm have pretty much a hard time converting or doing anything more to what the PDF is. Although there are a lot of publishers who release e-books and convert them into .pdf files. They're pretty usable to them but not to the a lot of people.
Bypass InDesign?
What would happen if you bypassed InDesign?
I'm thinking of something along the lines of BookBrewer.
And hey, if the Chronicle of Higher Ed is writing about it, it almost has to be yesterday's news ;).
There are converters
There are converters available over internet where you can convert any files into PDF and vise versa.
Post new comment