asciilifeform: but more relevant to printers. fact is, reading anything technical that wasn't formatted for a particular page shape, and suffer idiot breaks.
asciilifeform: plenty of things were written to fit in its 'screen-full'
asciilifeform: well, elementary case of msdos text mode.
asciilifeform: fact is, i don't want to read code page-broken in random places.
asciilifeform: except those were vital organs, not warts
asciilifeform: also must appreciate how much hand-driven 'typesetting' (e.g., using linebreaks and editing around known fixed row/column viewers such as the 80x25 term) took place in the 'golden age' of fido et al
asciilifeform: basic problem here: if there were ten million idiots swinging hammers at strangers in the city streets, it does not thereby follow that carpenters ought to get by without hammers.
asciilifeform: aha i'll wait for somebody to asciiart my old soviet magazine scans, yes.
asciilifeform: but notice humans are still involved in typesetting.
asciilifeform: incidentally, they have quite a bit of clever automatics re: reflow
asciilifeform: tell that to the latex folks, they would love to know the elixir.
asciilifeform: i question that it even makes sense to ask for smart reflow independent of page size and shape
asciilifeform: the only solution to above is to essentially do the typesetter's job and latexize it
asciilifeform: and reflowable text sent to printer, looks like piss.
asciilifeform: i like manuals, academic papers, etc. in dead tree.
asciilifeform: it's still state of the art in driving printer.
asciilifeform: no demented font substitutions, no dysfunctional selective execution of 'stylesheet' crud, etc.
asciilifeform: plenty of people who aren't the least bit idiotic or government-affiliated want to package a document and have it appear exactly the same on the other end of the wire.
asciilifeform: it's essentially the same as the reason 'flash' exists.
asciilifeform: the interesting thing is the 'psychiatric' reason for the pestilential spread of pdf for text.
asciilifeform: i did write a gizmo that outputs graphical render for the pages, but realized that the bandwidth and disk cache costs would break my back, and then let the domain go to the vultures.
asciilifeform: but then realized that it would be mostly useless (in those days, almost everything i ever saw in 'pdf' belonged in that or similar format - technical documents heavy on graphics)
asciilifeform: kakobrekla, mircea_popescu, others - re: 'nopdf' - i actually used to own 'nopdf.com' and planned to put a similar widget there. (2009-ish?)
asciilifeform: i did the last merge personally, and i think a few folks here are using it
asciilifeform: (which others must sign? this question has not been formally answered yet. on account of there not being a real maintainer.)
asciilifeform: that is, it must address a specific thing, and patch is not really considered worthwhile until other participants are willing to sign it.
asciilifeform: the only thing not mentioned there, is the absolute need for patches to be readable
asciilifeform: but unless i am mistaken, mircea_popescu is proceeding from an understanding that a quality reference implementation will require paid experts.
asciilifeform: if the troops are able and willing to follow jurov's turdatron rules (as well as produce quality work) - great news.
