Sky & Telescope Online Archive - Good?

I have been poking around on web sites thinking about
subscribing to an astonomy mag and noticed that S&T has
an online archive of articles from 1996 to present.

This sounds pretty good, but it's not too specific in
how much info is there? Is there a select article from
each issue? The entire issue? (that would be ideal, so
probably not ).

Anyone have any opinions on this service? It is $20 per
year for non-subscribers ($10 for subscribers).

Thanks,
Tom

"Thomas Funk" wrote in message
...

This sounds pretty good, but it's not too specific in
how much info is there? Is there a select article from
each issue? The entire issue? (that would be ideal, so
probably not ).

All major articles are made available. Along with those and
the news section of the web-site, I don't need the print magazine
anymore. The only problem is that they are PDF files. Acrobat
sucks [1]. Often these are security-locked, but you can grab a screen
shot and successfully OCR the text, then discard the original PDF.



[1] Traditionally, Adobe was a mixture of straw, water and cow dung.
The modern Adobe omits the first 2 ingredients.

Amen Brother, PDF blows big time.

John.

"John Graff" wrote in message ...
Amen Brother, PDF blows big time.

If you're referring to the PDF reader invoked by a browser, I'd agree.

PDF (standalone) works fine on any platform I choose to use (UNIX, Solaris,
Linux, Windows). I realize, though, there are PDF documents on the web that
are unable to be downloaded for local viewing, and that sucks dead bunnies
through a straw.

Though I prefer PostScript, PDF does fulfill the "P"ortability part of its
name far, far better than HTML (due to the vagaries of all the different
browsers and versions thereof).

What else would you suggest or recommend?

"John Graff" wrote in message
...

Amen Brother, PDF blows big time.

"Thad Floryan" wrote in message
om...

What else would you suggest or recommend?

Thad--

i'd recommend that magazine publishers stop trying to convert the web to the
magazine paradigm. to the end user, .pdf is good for one thing: allows
printing a document as the person who prepared it intended it to look. that
makes it wonderful for things like forms. if there's no intent for the end
user to print it, there's no need for .pdf. further, for 90+% of the web (a
number i pulled out of thin air, so please don't quibble with me about it),
the exact appearance of a web page on a browser is irrelevant if the person
who wrote it would just let go of thinking he/she has to control its
appearance down to the nth degree. it's the info that's king, not the
minutae of its layout.

clear, dark skies--

mark d.

On Tue, 07 Oct 2003 13:46:26 GMT, mark d. doiron deletethis@markdoiron scribbled:
"John Graff" wrote in message
...

Amen Brother, PDF blows big time.

"Thad Floryan" wrote in message
om...

What else would you suggest or recommend?

Thad--

i'd recommend that magazine publishers stop trying to convert the web to the
magazine paradigm. to the end user, .pdf is good for one thing: allows
printing a document as the person who prepared it intended it to look. that
makes it wonderful for things like forms. if there's no intent for the end
user to print it, there's no need for .pdf. further, for 90+% of the web (a
number i pulled out of thin air, so please don't quibble with me about it),
the exact appearance of a web page on a browser is irrelevant if the person
who wrote it would just let go of thinking he/she has to control its
appearance down to the nth degree. it's the info that's king, not the
minutae of its layout.

In a perfect world, sure, having a Web version would be nice. However,
practically, the expense can be too much for an organization. I'm
assuming that S&T basically throws articles from their magazine up
in PDF format because it is cheap and effective: they've already
spent money getting the layout in place and the print version
printed.

Where I work, sometimes you have to do the expedient, cheap
thing, rather than the right thing.

VJM

"Vincent J. Murphy" wrote in message
...

In a perfect world, sure, having a Web version would
be nice. However, practically, the expense can be too
much for an organization. I'm assuming that S&T
basically throws articles from their magazine up
in PDF format because it is cheap and effective:

Vincent--

excellent point. my comments were more focused on the problems i've
experienced with .pdf's on and off the web rather than on S&T's specific
implementation.

clear, dark skies--

mark d.