david said:

But back to the Bowerbird case...

i was wondering when we were gonna stop wasting time talking about frivolous topics like .pdf and usability, and get back to the most important topic of all -- me! so thanks for getting us back on-point, david... ;+)

he contends that his Z.M.L. tool written in gwbasic (or whatever its using these days)

realbasic. http://www.realsoftware.com it runs on mac (classic and o.s.x.) and windows (95 and up) and even some flavors of linux. likewise, it creates programs that run on all those platforms as well... and just this week, they announced a new version -- rb2005, which is written in realbasic, so it is a wonderful example of eating your own pudding -- and they are making the entry-level linux version free (as in free beer). i take it you're one of those language snobs who wouldn't even consider basic, but if i'm wrong, you should take a good look at it. lots of power in it, and cross-plat that really works. i have no linux experience, so i haven't compiled my viewer-program out to linux yet, but if you want to be my guinea-pig, i mean "alpha-tester", let me know.

can do everything including make coffee

i don't drink coffee, so there are no plans in that regard.

walk the dog

we have a cat. she walks herself. and given my gut, i should take my own walks. so again, no plans. i _do_ eat, however. and i like toasted-cheese sandwiches. so i _do_ have plans to put a routine in my viewer-program that will make a toasted-cheese sandwich. you'll be able to specify the type of bread, how light/dark you want it toasted, and any amount of several different types of cheeses, so i am quite excited about this. i just wish i knew how to program it. perhaps i'll start an open-source effort. got any advice for me?

and oh yeah, convert pdfs to a pleasant-to-read format.

no, that's not really my objective. yes, the .pdfs that my program creates _are_ pleasant-to-read, because they're just a .pdf version of what my viewer displays... but the "roundtripping" goal is that when my program makes a .pdf, the end-user can copy the text out of it, make a few global changes, and then stick it right back into my viewer and it will look the same. create another .pdf from that and it'll look identical to the first .pdf; and you can again copy the text out of that, make the global changes, and then stick it right back into my viewer and it will look the same. no fuss, no muss, no reapplication of markup, just roundtrip usage...

If this is true, this would be the first tool out of literally dozens that I've tried to accomplish this feat successfully.

actually, getting the exact same text out that you put in is not all _that_ remarkable. or _shouldn't_ be, anyway. but yeah, i know of no other tool that can do it either...

But I'm not going to go install DOS and gwbasic to find out.

you silly boy. i moved out of dos well over a decade ago. and gwbasic was always quite inferior compared to qbasic. (although, as a command-line processor, dos was a _very_ friendly interface for a power-user like myself. my word, i had .bat files that would interactively create .bat files! two-letter .bat files give you 500+ quickly-run commands. i tell ya, there were many times my efficiency could _fly_. compared to that, a graphical-user-interface is molasses. but hey, it's all about selling units to the masses, right?) anyway, david, wanna alpha-test? or would you prefer to wait for the toasted-cheese sandwich feature? -bowerbird