COLLECTED BY
Organization:
Archive Team
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.
The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.
This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.
Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.
The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.
ArchiveBot is an IRC bot designed to automate the archival of smaller websites (e.g. up to a few hundred thousand URLs). You give it a URL to start at, and it grabs all content under that URL, records it in a WARC, and then uploads that WARC to ArchiveTeam servers for eventual injection into the Internet Archive (or other archive sites).
To use ArchiveBot, drop by #archivebot on EFNet. To interact with ArchiveBot, you issue commands by typing it into the channel. Note you will need channel operator permissions in order to issue archiving jobs. The dashboard shows the sites being downloaded currently.
There is a dashboard running for the archivebot process at http://www.archivebot.com.
ArchiveBot's source code can be found at https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot.
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20240404031526/http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-not-pdf.html
What is the PDF format good for? Short version
Nothing. Use HTML and/or (compressed) Postscript instead.
What is the PDF format good for? Long version
PDF (portable document format) is a document file format
proposed by Adobe. It is a stripped-down version of Postscript, with
some incompatible additions. It is somewhat more compact than plain
uncompressed Postscript, due to compression, and it offers hypertext
facilities. But is it actually useful?
Is it useful for on-screen reading?
No. The fixed formatting of PDF documents means that it never fits
well on the screen. The division into pages makes little sense for
on-screen reading, where scrolling is much more natural than leafing;
and the aspect ratio (which is usually not 4:3) and size of the pages
require an irritating combination of scrolling and leafing. In the
meantime Adobe have noticed this and their Acroread shows the document
as a big scrollable entity, but the page breaks are still disturbing,
and other viewers (xpdf, gv) don't do this yet.
The attraction of PDF for authors is that the reader will
supposedly see the document formatted in the same way as the author
(however, incomplete PDFs often ruin
that). This makes some sense for paper, where the size is
standardized; but it does not make sense for screens, which come in
many sizes and resolutions, from the 10" 640*480 notebook screen to
the 21" 1600*1200 CRT, in monochrome or colour. (Actually, if we
consider people with bad eyes, fixed formatting is not even a good
idea for paper; it's just an artifact of mass reproduction techniques
like the printing press.)
Authors should forget about complete control in such an
environment, unless they want to inconvenience their readers. It is
much better to describe the document structure, and leave the
formatting to the browser, guided by the reader's preferences. That's
the idea behind standard HTML. Try to get by with it. (Note that many
Netscape "extensions" to HTML are contrary to this spirit, and indeed,
documents employing them often look badly when displayed with a
different window size, font, or colour depth than they were designed
for; not to mention how they look on non-Netscape browsers).
Is it useful for on-paper reading?
In this respect PDF offers no advantages (that I know of) over
Postscript except a more compact representation when not
compressed. However, this reverses itself when you use decent
compression programs:
File size comparison
This subsection is as long as it is, because many people have made
claims about it, so I made some measurements; it is not that long
because I think it's particularly important.
As you can see below, gzipped Postscript is almost twice as compact
as gzipped PDF and more than twice as compact as plain PDF.
Size File&Format;
-rw-r--r-- 1 anton vip 1041321 Nov 9 11:45 intel-opt32-ap526.ps
-rw-r--r-- 1 anton vip 411050 Nov 8 18:30 intel-opt32-ap526.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 anton vip 329586 Nov 8 18:30 intel-opt32-ap526.pdf.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 anton vip 181135 Nov 9 11:45 intel-opt32-ap526.ps.gz
In this example, the Postscript was generated from the PDF file, which
contained no links. The conversion to Postscript was performed with
xpdf 0.7. The original file is the Intel Architecture
Optimizations Manual; you can get it here
(but only a newer version, I used 24281601). With xpdf 0.7a
(encryption) the Postscript output and it's compressed form is more
bloated, but the ps.gz is still much smaller than the .pdf:
-rw-r--r-- 1 anton vip 1353166 Jun 10 13:55 xxx.ps
-rw-r--r-- 1 anton vip 254710 Jun 10 13:55 xxx.ps.gz
Another example is the files available here. These
were converted from Postscript into PDF with ghostscript 5.01. The
sums of the file sizes are:
.doc (Winword): 2.885.849
.ps (with Winword from .doc): 4.959.680
.ps.gz: 1.346.021
.pdf (with gs-5.01 from .ps): 1.704.794
.pdf.gz: 1.441.079
Interestingly, here converting the PDF back into Postscript with xpdf
0.7a (encryption) results in .ps.gz files that are larger than the
.pdf files (unfortunately, xpdf 0.7 does not work on these files):
.ps (with xpdf 0.7a from .pdf): 9726203
.ps.gz: 2186707
The following shows more examples (all converted from PDF to
Postscript using xpdf 0.7a (encryption), compressed with gzip -9); I
did not select these files for compressability (except manual.ps,
which I downloaded because its author claimed that it is an example
where PDF is more compact than .ps.gz), these are just all the PDF
files that happened to be in my download directory (plus
intel-opt32-ap526.pdf).
.PDF .pdf.gz .ps .ps.gz .ps.gz/.pdf
243943 190754 656255 123315 51% PRG.pdf
846435 455866 1037500 280930 33% ThinkingInPostScript.pdf
5996975 5894534 12689450 5443575 91% allconnr.pdf
306033 262771 1436313 270212 88% manual.pdf
1986820 1605659 5184809 944873 48% pem32b.pdf
1398720 547655 3108610 471592 34% k6-2-optimization.pdf
Another example is one of my own papers, where the original ps.gz
file takes 63484 bytes (298500 bytes uncompressed), whereas the PDF
(converted by Peter Knaggs) takes 169520 bytes, a factor 2.67.
But I want to have a single source for on-screen and on-paper
documents.
Then the answer is to write the document in a form that can be
converted to formats suitable for on-screen and on-paper reading. An
example is the texinfo format, which can be converted to the on-screen
formats info and HTML, and to Postscript and other printer formats
supported by TeX. Another example is LaTeX, which can be printed
and/or converted to HTML by tth or latex2html. A
third example is the Linuxdoc-SGML format, which can be converted to
HTML, plain text, LaTeX and other formats. And if that's too involved
for you, HTML also gives decent printouts for not-too-long documents.
A good example of how to do it is the Supercomuting'96 proceedings
CD. It contains all the papers in HTML and Postscript forms. (The
only negative point I have noticed is that the table-of-contents does
not work with my browsers).
Other PDF Disadvantages
PDF readers and converters are not as widely available as HTML
browsers or Postscript previewers or printers. And even if they are
available, they often leave something to be desired:
- The Acrobat reader for DOS that I have is dog slow, generates
gigantic Postscript files, and those files don't even conform to the
Adobe document structuring conventions for Postscript files, so I
cannot use Postscript tools to, e.g., print two pages per sheet. (Can
anybody tell me why a product from Adobe ignores Adobe's conventions?
Well, it's not the only one.)
- The Acrobat Reader for Digital Unix that we have does not display
anything useful on the NCD X-Terminals that we have (looks like a
bit-reversal bug).
- The Acrobat reader for the Mac used by my boss replaced a font it
did not have with a wider font (courier), thus overwriting the
following text.
- xpdf 0.7 cannot deal with encrypted PDF files, and segfaults on
some others. xpdf 0.7a displays most files I have, but for one it displays
garbage under Linux and 0.7a (encryption) crashes under Digital Unix.
- For the Jazelle white paper,
- xpdf 0.91 crashes;
- acroread 3.0 displays all graphics in
solid black (i.e. no features visible apart from the outline) and
Figure 3 not at all;
- xpdf 0.7a does not display Figure 3.
- According to a mail I received, xpdf 2.x does not cause more
problems than Acroread on every file he tried.
For those of you who happen to have a PDF reader but not a
Postscript reader, look at the Ghostscript Home
Page for relief.
Disclaimer
Maybe there are applications where PDF is really useful, but I have
yet to see one. Before you publish a PDF file, please ponder the
points discussed above and consider other formats like HTML and
gzipped Postscript.
Related Stuff
Anton Ertl
