Acrobatic Dead Horses -- Michael J. Tardiff writes with one final comment about Acrobat: Ray Davis's comments in NetBITS-016 brought to mind my past experiences in dealing with the "structure vs

PDF without a Font Net -- Chris Ruebeck adds to the discussion surrounding PDF on the Web, started by Mike Lee's article in NetBITS-014: I would like to add to the comments of Ray Davis on the subject of PDF's incongruities with the Web

Why Make Netscape Source Available for Free? Jim Peters offers a suggestion for why Netscape is making the source code for Communicator 5.0 available for free on the Internet, as we mentioned in NetBITS-016: Perhaps you don't understand the motivation behind the free software community

Cable Whiplash -- Kate Binder complains that her cable modem connection isn't nearly what it's cracked up to be. Although we have no specific suggestions to pass along to Kate, if anyone out there has some ideas, please send them to Kate directly. I noticed that you'll be covering cable modem issues next week

More on Cable Modems -- Johann Beda writes in regard to his cable modem connection: I just got hooked up here in southwestern Ontario with The Wave through the local cable TV provider

Feel the Buzz -- Joel Smith writes about an electrifying subject: using power transmission lines for data access. For background, according to the November 1997 issue of The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing, European and Southeast Asian power grids have an advantage over the U.S

Special Acrobatics -- Francois Pottier passes along news of a free method of creating Acrobat PDF files (see NetBITS-014): For people who don't want to buy the full Acrobat package, it's also possible to create PDF files using free tools, like a recent version of GhostScript, which can convert PostScript files to PDF files

Fall from the High Wire -- Ray Davis offers an excellent rebuttal to Mike Lee's view of Adobe Acrobat in NetBITS-014: I was disappointed to see the unqualified rave for Adobe's PDF electronic document format

Acrobatics -- Davide Guarisco offered some addenda to Mike Lee's article on Acrobat in NetBITS-014: First, with the newest Macintosh LaserWriter software from Apple (8.5.1) it's even easier to create PDF documents

JavaScript Yourself Anonymous -- In response to letters on hiding your email address on a Web page to avoid spammers sucking it down, Joseph McLean wrote us with a nifty JavaScript-based solution, which he offers for free: Brandon Munday mentioned how he removed all "clickable" mailto links from his Web site to thwart the evil address-collecting spiders

Long and Short of It -- James Weissman notes that many systems that can't support long filenames are able to use mapping - a table of the short names and the longer ones they correspond to - to provide nicer looking URLs. EnterpriseWeb/VM is a Web server that runs under the IBM VM/CMS mainframe operating system where file identifiers can have an 8 character name and 8 character type

Filename Extension -- Steve Peterson pointed out that Windows 95 is more clever than we gave it credit for when mapping its long filenames to short ones. On floppy disks it's a little more complicated

X-Rated Placeholders -- A random and amusing anecdote arrived from Russell Aminzade : I had a job recently developing a Web site for an intranet for a division of a Fortune 100 computer company

Cleaning Windows -- Last issue in NetBITS Updates, we expressed confusion that no one writing about Microsoft's attempts to offer versions of its Windows 95 operating system without Internet Explorer mentioned that the original Windows 95 system was still in use on tens of millions of machines

Imaging an Address -- Brandon Munday offers a suggestion for displaying your email address on a Web page in a manner that prevents automated spiders from sucking it down: I used an image editing program to create a graphic image of my email address, in a font and size similar to that used by most browsers