Publishing taxa in Latin and in print

Michael Mace michaelcmace@gmail.com
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:30:44 PDT
Lou wrote:

>> You can be sure pdf software will be dinosauric in the next century.
Descriptions from our era might be very difficult to locate then....

Speaking as a computer guy, file formats are not nearly as big a problem as
hardware formats.  Companies eventually stop making the hardware readers for
things like floppy drives, and even cable connectors go out of use over
time.  Obscure file formats also go out of use.  But if a file format was
popular in the past and is well documented, companies tend to keep it in
their apps as a checkoff item.  And if not, the Internet has made it easy to
find file converters.

For example, Roger's Word Perfect 5.1 file is easy to open on a PC today.
The hard part is getting it off that old floppy disk.

PDF is about the closest thing we have to a universal document format today.
I'm sure it'll be replaced by something better in the future, but because
there are so many documents stored in it, I'm confident that we're going to
be able to continue reading it for as long as we have digital data.

Mike
San Jose, CA


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