Farang Affairs Pictorial No23 Out Now

[philmac]

Farang Affairs Pictorial No 23

Inside Soi 33's 'painter's bars'

Download at PDF

Farang affairs

Subscribe to your own copy of Farang Affairs by email:

[email protected]?subject=subscribe

Alternative download here:

fa23.pdf

[ToeCutter]

Ah quality, so well done, its idiotic, its brilliant!!!

[cdnvic]

One day I'm going to buy a rifle and track down the inventor of .pdf files.

cv

[Insight]

One day I'm going to buy a rifle and track down the inventor of .pdf files. 

cv

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What's your vex with them?

I find viewing them in the browser a bit of a pain in the arse on slow connections - very poorly implemented. Saving them to the hard disk first then browsing from there works fine though...

[TizMe]

PDF files are great for something that needs to be printed. But any document that is designed to be viewed on the internet should be created in the standard internet format, which is HTML.

[cdnvic]

They are fine for offline viewing/printing, but I find that some sites just use them way too much. They should be in HTML, with an option of a pdf.

I think that with the $200+ price tag for Adobe Acrobat, most webmasters want to use it as much as possible to justify the cost.

There's others that you can use to make pdf's with now that cost little compared to Adobe.

cv

[philmac]

What's this. anti-pdf week.

pdf is used for farang affairs pictorial rather than html because it allows for infinitely more and better design possibilities (not that you would know from looking at what i produce!), embeds original fonts, produces better quality pics, packs nicely in to a relatively small file size when distilled from quark express, and can be stored and archived easily once downloaded.

For me to design anything remotely similar directly on frontpage or dreamweaver would be a nightmare. Besides that, you have to worry about image size, optimization, slicing etc etc. With quark I can put a 10 megabite tiff image of any print size on the page, resize it easily, place anywhere on the page in a couple of seconds, and it makes no difference to the overall file size once converted to a pdf file.

To get a similar look on html, I need to design it in quark and distil it to pdf. Then from pdf, I have to covert it to rtf (pdf direct to html gives appalling results), then from rtf to html, which gives good results, but a file size of about 1.5MB and and a page that's is way too big for the computer screen. Then I have to try and resize it in image ready making sure that the print size is still big enough to read when I finally manage to size on the screen (and what about different screen sizes), But i still end up with a file size anywhere between 200kb and 1MB depending on which way the wind is blowing.

Preference is for subscribers who receive each issue by email. Free Yahoo (i think), hotmail and others don't accept html e-mail messages. I could send the html as an image file attachment (jpeg, gif) but the file size would be bigger and the quality less than a pdf.

err...that's my excuse. Download the latest Acrobat Reader from www.adobe.com, then there shouldn't be a problem.

Or subscribe, tell me you want html and I'll send it to those who want it in that format.

[cdnvic]

I'm not disagreeing with you on the technichal points. But from a marketing standpoint when alot of people see that .pdf there and don't feel like opening acrobat in our browsers we simply give it a miss and go on, never seeing the design at all.

I use .pdf myself, but only as an optional downloadable catalog, with html being the standard. Judging by hits and downloads, the .pdf is hardly worth the trouble as most just go for the online html version.

Now, if some genius out there can design a browser that reads pdf without having to load that bulky reader in there, then pdf may have its day yet.

Oh, and yahoo, mail.com, etc all recieve html mail.

cv

Edited January 22, 2005 by cdnvic

[cdnvic]

Now, since you went to all that trouble explaining things to me I decided I'd give it a go and it was definitly worth opening that bulky adobe plugin.

Well done.

Especially the election poster on the front page.

cv

[philmac]

Farang affairs pictorial was never meant to be viewed on the internet. The intention is to make available for those who wanted it via free email subscription. Then it was also made available here at Thai Visa for downloading onto the computer hard drives for viewing by people who wanted it, and to build the subscription mailing list

The website is essentially to post the expat page, which I write for The Nation because about three months ago the nation's webmaster removed the link to the expat page and now people tell me it has become almost impossible to find on the site.

Whether it is worth downloading or not is up to you guys

thanks for your comments

[fatter than harry]

If it's any consolation, pdf or no pdf, we're crying in the office!

[Insight]

Quality, especially the "Brave Predictions"

Only one small gripe with the web content Phil - Understand you try to lay it out like a newspaper, split into columns. Only problem with this is that I find myself scrolling all over the show to read it, especially when the browser is resized to less than full screen (1024x768 on this laptop).

Certainally doesn't put me off reading it tho!