[Sugar-devel] Deployment feedback braindump

[Albert Cahalan]

S Page writes:
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Daniel Drake<dsd at laptop.org> wrote:

>> adding an interactivity component that would be impossible
>> to have when working with paper-based exercise books.
>
> And impossible with PDFs.

No way. PDFs can be interactive in many ways.

First of all, a PDF is pretty much just well-behaved postscript.
You can embed that in more postscript. The user can thus scribble
all over the document.

Second, the PDF format has long had form support. It's pretty much
like HTML forms, but much more attractive. I've used this several
times in xpdf and/or evince, and it works very well. You get the
choice of filling out the PDF form directly, or doing things the
traditional way on paper.

Finally, you can put JavaScript in a PDF. I'm not sure if any of
the free software viewers can handle this yet. In theory you can
have all sorts of animations. It's kind of like flash.