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PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch)
Linux-Watch reports that
Adobe is hoping to make PDF an ISO standard. "Adobe Systems Inc. on
Jan. 29 announced that it has released the full PDF (Portable Document
Format) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Association for Information and
Image Management. AIIM, in turn, will start working on making PDF an ISO
standard."
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PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 29, 2007 18:48 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] Cool. Does anyone know if the PDF 1.7 specification includes all the stuff that Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader support, or is it a more limited 'open' specification that only includes certain features?
It's already pretty open and pretty well specified Posted Jan 30, 2007 1:16 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] The PDF spec as of 1.6 is already very complete. I think they hold back on some of the features used to "enable" Adobe Reader to do things only normally possible in Acrobat, and maybe some of the more esoteric stuff is missing, but it's pretty darn good. Like any standards document that tracks a dominant implementation there are errors, assumptions and omissions, but it's generally great.
Applications like Scribus were built using those documents, though not without a bit of investigation of real-world PDFs too.
Frankly, I don't think much will change with this move, since PDF is already a well documented standard with some solid guarantees for implementors. It's not directed by an independent body but would otherwise qualify as an open standard already.
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 29, 2007 19:10 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link] You don't suppose this is a preemptive move in case MS decides to throw their PDF-imitator format in for the same kind of ramrod approval that OpenXML is undergoing, do you?
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 29, 2007 20:40 UTC (Mon) by jpetso (guest, #36230) [Link] Even if this is some preemptive move against XPS, it can only bebeneficial to Free Software and the Open Standards community on the whole. Lately, PDF has steered away from the open standard that it was supposed to be: Adobe threatening Microsoft about PDF generator inclusion in MS Office, Adobe not publishing new specs and trying to keep its Acrobat monopoly with less likeable tactics, and stuff.
It's high time that either PDF or XPS is submitted to the ISO, because
I'd say, competition is really beneficial to us this time. Technically,
Let's see. When Microsoft is able to include a PDF printer in MS Office
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 29, 2007 20:58 UTC (Mon) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link] Why do you think XPS is "cleaner"? I'd say PDF is the cleaner one. It's translates beautifully to Postscript (which is still state of the art and has built a whole industry around it) and it's got a very simple state machine to do the rendering. I don't know about the Adobe extensions, the DRM and forms parts, but the rest is really good.
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 30, 2007 1:19 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] PDF is also very efficient in storage and in terms of navigation around the document. The cross reference table and file-offset based indirect objects makes for a nice way to get around the document without having to sequentially load the whole damn thing into RAM or repeatedly parse it like XML.
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 30, 2007 2:54 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link] Note that not all of PDF can be translated cleanly to efficient PostScript.
PDF allows you to blend one image over the top of another, while PostScript does not. Further more, PostScript does not give access to the pixels for what you've currently drawn so you can't really implement these blend modes in PostScript code.
Usually the best translation is to pre-render the blended portions of the resulting page and include them in the PostScript as an image. Of course, this results in large files and loses some of PostScript's resolution independence.
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 29, 2007 23:32 UTC (Mon) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link] OK, I realize this is a newbie question, but since the issue of Free Software-friendly page description languages has been raised, how does SVG compare to PDF and XPS?
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 30, 2007 2:45 UTC (Tue) by BobT (guest, #37148) [Link] "Adobe trying to keep its Acrobat monopoly""When Microsoft is able to include a PDF printer in MS Office"
It's Microsoft that the courts have decided is a monopoly. Adobe has had lots of competition in PDF-generation and hasn't complained. But when the monopoly (Microsoft) wants to bundle a PDF generator in their monopoly product, it is clearly an anti-trust violation and Adobe complains. That has nothing to do with the openness of the standard. If Microsoft were to sell a separate product in competition with Acrobat, Adobe would have no complaint. It's the *bundling* that is the problem.
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 30, 2007 10:18 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] So why should OOo and KDE be allowed to integrate PDF export? After all, it is not a separate product.
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 30, 2007 11:53 UTC (Tue) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link] Becasue OO.o and KDE does not own 99% of the worlds desktops?
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 30, 2007 12:35 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Because I think that Microsoft was full of crap about the whole PDF thing.
Did you ever see the PDFs produced by the beta version MS Office? They were nearly unusable.
I know I only seen one and it wasn't very complicated.. quite ugly actually, but it used up a hell of a lot more resources to view then it should of. And I am not talking about 'oh just a few megs bigger' or anything like that.. I am talking about making-my-pcs-nearly-unusable type resource usage.
This is like HTML exported by older versions of Office (I doubt newer versions of Office are any better). A simple 'hello world' type HTML document is HUGE and any sort of document that is of even moderate complexity produced by MS Office is almost completely unreadable and nearly unusable.
Seriously. The whole Adobe vs Microsoft PDF thing was very weird in how it turned out. Microsoft making a announcement saying something along the lines of "Adobe says we can't have PDF support so we won't".
Usually with that sort of thing you'd have Adobe complaining up and down and left and right about how Microsoft is going to destroy them. Just like the spyware/anti-virus industry flipped out on Microsoft for that Windows defender that is freely aviable download for Windows users. They threatened Microsoft with lawsuits also and MS just blew them off.
Why should Adobe be any different? It's very unusual for Microsoft to just give up without a fight like that.
The more I think about it the more it looks like Microsoft purposely abadonded PDF as a FUD tatic.
It was right around the same time were people were talking about using PDF as a standard format for government records, public documentation and such. One of the big things about PDF was that it was already a defacto standard among numerious applications and that DOC format was only supported well by one peice of commercial software.
PDF to become an open, ISO standard (Linux-Watch) Posted Jan 30, 2007 5:43 UTC (Tue) by jayorke (guest, #10685) [Link] Does this include an open standard for public implementations of the "Protect an Adobe PDF File service"?
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