Vardibidian at Tohu Bohu has a good e-laugh, courtesy of Geoff Pullum's suggestion that “Minimum trust in document transfer means only letting people have things in a page description language like PostScript, or better, PDF. It means they can't edit the file they receive, they can only print it, and if it prints at all it prints exactly the way you want it to.”
Quoting now:
"AhahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahahooooooooooooohahahahaha."
Before I saw this, I was going to make a polite observation or two about some of my experiences trying to share .pdf files with publishers. But Varbidian's less intellectual approach is better, I think, and I'll spare you my tales of woe. I've healed, you see, and am reluctant to re-open old wounds. Also, the statute of limitations on DMCA violations has not expired... I'll just mention that the usual culprit is an unembeddable font or two (or worse, an older font lacking the now-required specific permission to be embedded), and some of the issues involved are discussed here.
Posted by Mark Liberman at August 3, 2004 02:29 PM