[FOM] Good gnus for Russell Scholars

[hendrik@topoi.pooq.com]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 11:51:46AM +0100, Thomas Forster wrote:
> 
> I have for some time been trying to persuade Cambridge University Press to
> issue Russell-and-Whitehead Principia Mathematica on a CD in a suitable
> searchable format of some kind (not just a lot of jpg files!)  I had lunch
> with Roger Astley the other day and had - as usual - armed myself with
> further evidence that this would be a Good Thing, only to discover that i
> had already convinced him and the matter was in hand!  It seems that the
> plan is to issue it in pdf.

I would hope for something a litle more software-friendly, such as 
opendoc or xml.  pdf is kind of a dead-end file format, suitable 
primarily for printing, and to a much lesser extent on-screen viewing.  
It is particularly bad for any software that micht want to process the 
content, such as proof-checkers.

> God knows how they will deal with all those
> funny characters but they seem to think they can do it.

  pdf is a version of postscript, which can have its own font 
definitions.  Or, if all they want you to do is print or view the text, 
they could use inline graphic images wherever the fonts go weird.
xml code can introduce special tags of its own for the weird
characters.

-- hendrik