Who needs Acrobat 7? [LWN.net]

Who needs Acrobat 7?

Posted Mar 31, 2005 13:43 UTC (Thu) by cpm (subscriber, #3554)
In reply to: Who needs Acrobat 7? by bkw1a
Parent article: Unexpected features in Acrobat 7

Does PDF mean portable document format? Or does it mean Proprietary Deliverable Forms?

If it means the former, then I don' WANT TO FILL OUT FROMS in a
document. I want pdfs to act like pdfs. If it means the latter,
I don't want to play.

pdf, which is an adobe creation, is a cool thing, been around a
long while, and is very useful, as a pdf.

All these "features" speak to me of proprietary vendor lock-in.

I see this as a step in the wrong direction.

If a business vendor requires proprietary software on my behalf,
I find another vendor. If a customer requires proprietary
software on my behalf, that's the beauty of an open market. They
can shop elsewhere. No harm, no foul.

Open business is about open standards.

I don't have much use for the proprietary stuff. I wish folks
wouldn't encourage it.

Word count, proprietary 5
open 3

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Who needs Acrobat 7?

Posted Mar 31, 2005 19:03 UTC (Thu) by dw (subscriber, #12017) [Link]

The PDF specification is an open, backwards compatible standard. It is built upon other open standards, ECMAScript being only one of them. It would take Adobe to turn seriously evil and counter to the existing way PDF has been developed over the years, before they could create lock-in.

Also don't forget that at least one other major PDF renderer exists in the wild that is not controlled by Adobe (AFAIK) - that built into Mac OSX as part of its display/printing subsystem. (Note: I have never used OSX, I'm going from what I read).

If you can stomach the hundreds of pages of specification, the PDF spec is quite an enthralling read. The format is very well designed and specified. +1 to Adobe.

Who needs Acrobat 7?

Posted Mar 31, 2005 22:25 UTC (Thu) by grouch (subscriber, #27289) [Link]

>It would take Adobe to turn seriously evil [ . . . ]

As in Dmitri Sklyarov being arrested and kept from his family?

HTML supports forms. I have no use for another method of spyware.

Who needs Acrobat 7?

Posted Apr 1, 2005 14:10 UTC (Fri) by ohanssen (subscriber, #2761) [Link]

My government gives me three alternatives for filling in a
given form, which I regularily need to do.

1) Using a windows only program.
2) Using a pdf form.
3) Filling in a paper form by hand.

BTW, are there internationalised versions of acroread 5 and 7
for linux available? No?