Adobe To Release Full PDF Specification to ISO

nickull writes "Adobe announced it will release the entire PDF specification (current version 1.7 ) to the International Standards Organization (ISO) via AIIM. PDF has reached a point in its maturity cycle where maintaining it in an open standards manner is the next logical step in evolution. Not only does this reinforce Adobe's commitment to open standards (see also my earlier blog on the release of flash runtime code to the Tamarin open source project at Sourceforge), but it demonstrates that open standards and open source strategies are really becoming a mainstream concept in the software industry. So what does this really mean? Most people know that PDF is already a standard so why do this now? This event is very subtle yet very significant. PDF will go from being an open standard/specification and de facto standard to a full blown de jure standard. The difference will not affect implementers much given PDF has been a published open standard for years. There are some important distinctions however. First — others will have a clearly documented process for contributing to the future of the PDF specification. That process also clearly documents the path for others to contribute their own Intellectual property for consideration in future versions of the standard. Perhaps Adobe could have set up some open standards process within the company but this would be merely duplicating the open standards process, which we felt was the proper home for PDF. Second, it helps cement the full PDF specification as the umbrella specification for all the other PDF standards under the ISO umbrella such as PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/E. The move also helps realize the dreams of a fully open web as the web evolves (what some are calling Web 2.0), built upon truly open standards, technologies and protocols."

There is OS and OS

There are 2 types of OS: the "normal" one and the discriminatory one. So anybody but Microsoft can use this "Clos...Open Source" project?

ISO approved PDF

Is this a nail in the MS XML coffin?

Re:ISO approved PDF

Is this a nail in the MS XML coffin?

First, hopefully you were referring to XPS (XML Paper Specification) and not OpenXML, which many of the replies seem to assume. I don't see this as a counter move actually, but rather as business as usual. PDF has been an open standard for a long time and I don't know that any real player has any trouble getting Adobe to add to the spec. I'm glad they've formalized the process and renewed their commitment to keeping PDF an open standard.

I also don't see that PDF has much of a chance in the battle against XPS. Unless Microsoft is forbidden from bundling readers and writers with Windows, it will take over most of the market via that monopoly leveraging. By the time the courts act I suspect the market will already be destroyed and everyone will be locked into one set of tools made by MS. The courts will eventually rule against MS, and Adobe will get some money, but the market will never be repaired and consumers will be stuck with a PDF replacement where they can only get tools from one vendor and those tools will never be improved again.

I could be wrong. The courts could be faster than molasses or the industry as a whole could see the trap coming and stick with PDF despite MS. I don't suspect that will be the case though. The most realistic hopeful scenario would be Linux adoption by corporations and government taking off for managed desktops and OS X taking off in the home market sufficiently that the Windows monopoly is weakened enough so that MS cannot effectively manage a takeover based on their monopoly alone.

Re:ISO approved PDF

I also suspect MS will release XPS readers for multiple platforms.

Like Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, etc.?

Re:ISO approved PDF

Blame AcrobatViewer, not PDF.

Evince is fast and snappy here on my old and busted PIII 700Mhz, with only 128MB RAM.

Re:ISO approved PDF

Acrobat reader is widely known to be a resource hog, but banning PDFs is short sighted and reactionary. It's like banning shoes because you tripped once.

Foxit [foxitsoftware.com]. Windows and (now) Linux. Takes about 1/2 a second to open.

If you have a Mac, you have a slick one built in.

Re:ISO approved PDF

Even the most verbose XML couldn't come close to the unbelievable bloat that is .PDF.

The PDF standard does not seem particularly bloated to me.

I got sick of PDF's taking forever to loading, and the reader hanging constantly on our PC's at work, so I banned them from from the office. It shouldn't take a bleeding edge machine to open plain old documents in a reasonable amount of time.

Ignorance is one of the main reasons why open standards lose to MS proprietary ones in the market. The average person does not understand the advantages. One of the main advantages is that no one is locked into a single vendor for their tools. Despite this almost everyone uses the combination of Window+IE+Adobe Acrobat Reader Plug-in. This is a terrible toolset and is bloated, slow, and poorly designed. Windows can't multi-task memory resources if your life depended upon it. IE itself is bloated and poorly handles threading plug-ins and will hang the whole process until a download is complete. The acrobat plug-in is slow and bloated with all the default settings turned on. The end result is an average user with an average machine clicking on a PDF link and their whole machine grinding to a halt while it waits for the download to finish, then they get to wait yet longer while the Acrobat plug-in eventually gets around to its main purpose.

The solution is, quite simply, don't use that combination of tools. If you're on Windows there are plenty of great, free PDF readers. Foxit is my favorite. On Linux I like XPDF and on OS X I like Preview. You have choices because PDF is an open standard. Blaming a standard for the failings of a given tool is just plain incorrect.

Now I imagine you won't care what I say anyway and will be quite happy when Microsoft's bundled XPS format takes over the market. It will even render faster for you for some time, since the default tools will be built into the OS's display APIs. You'll probably be happy about this for years until you realize you can't move to another platform because all your files are trapped in one only MS's reader will open. Moreover, you'll probably be wondering why you need a top end machine 5 years from now to open files you used to be able to open on your old machine, but since there will only be one reader available you'll be stuck with that. And if they start adding DRM as a mandatory feature on XPS files, so that you have to register all the documents you create with MS, well what can you do? Sure you'll complain about these things, but what will you do? Everyone uses XPS and if you ever want to submit a resume you need to have Windows with its built-in XPS tools.

...or maybe you won't. Maybe you and the rest of the industry will wise up to the advantages of open standards, as a few large organizations currently seem to be doing. Maybe you'll just download a good PDF viewer and think to yourself, wow I'm glad I have options and I'm not stuck with just one viewer, that would suck."

Re:ISO approved PDF

IT people with your attitude drive me insane and give us all bad names. I can't imagine what kind of hoops your people have to jump through to get a stupid digital document. "Sorry, Ron, the asshole in IT won't let us use PDFs, can you send me a Word doc?" A University I was affiliated with did the same thing with regard to zip files. Zip files!!! So hundreds of scientists can't get work done because ONE jackass can't figure out how to better protect them than just outright banning a file type from email.

Find a solution to the problem. That's your job.

I didn't understand..

So I went to read the article..

The system was unable to find the module you requested to edit (moduleID ).

Kudos to them

I tip my hat to them.

I don't know that this move has more meaning today than if it was done two years ago, but I certainly see more motivation today. The purpose of the ODF is to ensure that 100 years from now we can still access data. Closed formats mean data may not be accessible in the future. PDF used to be the sole means to have a document look exactly the same across any platform. That is no longer the case, and even Microsoft has opened the standard (mostly) on their new Office data files.

While I still applaud the effort, Adobe is late to the party.

Re:Kudos to them

PDF used to be the sole means to have a document look exactly the same across any platform. That is no longer the case, and even Microsoft has opened the standard (mostly) on their new Office data files.

No, I disagree. Even when open office formats, the document won't look exactly the same on one an other platform. Example : the open document format (.odt) renders somewhat differently when opened in OpenOffice for Windows and OpenOffice for Linux. And it may be completely different when opened with koffice.
The content is the same, though.

What I believe is the .pdf excels in porting the exactly same layout of a page between platforms and softwares, while Office files excel in porting the exact editable content. Their goals are simply not the same.

Re:Kudos to them

Those are bugs in an implementation of a PDF viewer. They aren't bugs in the PDF standard.

Re:Kudos to them

Adobe PDF documents look the same on every computer, when printed as well as on the screen, why should MS word be any different? If Adobe can ignore the printer and display the document the same everywhere, and print it out the same, why can't MS word do this?

Well, one answer is that PDF can not do that. For instance if you print the same document that runs to the very edge of the page on two printers, one with a 1/4" margin and one with a 1/8" margin, you have two options. You can scale it, or not. If you scale it, the documents will be different sizes. If you do not, different amounts of the document will be unprinted (they lie in that unprintable margin area.) PDF doesn't override the physical limitations of the output device, it works within them just like every other program.

Another answer is that word is a big pile of crap.

Re:Kudos to them

I tip my hat to them.

I do too. This is a very mature and wise decision for Adobe to make.

I know now that I was wrong, but I did not care for PDFs for years. And still to this day I have issues with people that don't do them correctly (basically those that put a bunch of huge images into a PDF container).

But with the advent of Linux and especially OS X being able to create PDFs so easily, and I can share documents with anybody and have them look like they are supposed to look is very nice.

Although I would have prefered if this was an open spec with quality PDF generators from day one, 10 years or so of progress to that ultimate goal is not bad in the long run.

This model should be _the_ standard for propriatary data formats. By that, I mean going from propriatary to an open standard if it cannot be an open standard from the beginning. Autodesk, MS, etc, I'm looking at you for adopting such a respectable decision for document formats.

Thanks Microsoft?

Translation for mere mortals: Adobe is feeling the breath of Microsoft and its Metro [wikipedia.org]. They are so scared to become the next Netscape they are trying to nil any reason people may have to use Microsoft's XPS.

Open Standard != Open Source

... it demonstrates that open standards and open source strategies are really becoming a mainstream concept in the software industry.

I see nothing of that. When they open source Photoshop then we will know they support open source strategies. Until then, they are simply taking the path of least resistance.

B.

Flash SWF file specification not open

You cannot download the Flash File Format (SWF) specification without agreeing to a license which forbids writing a flash interpreter.

http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileforma t/faq/#item-1-8 [adobe.com]:

Can I use the File Format Specification to create a SWF interpreter or player?

No, the File Format Specification is provided for the specific purpose of enabling software applications to export to the Macromedia Flash File Format (SWF).

Tamarin

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/ [mozilla.org]

Please forgive my ignorance on the matter. I do recall reading the article earlier on how Adobe has released the code on the scripting portion of Flash to Mozilla, and how it created the Tamarin project.

Is the scripting portion alone enough for Mozilla to have their own embedded fully-functional Flash player?

Can we compile from source a 64-bit Flash player some day through this project?

The Tamarin Project mentions Firefox 2, and as far as I can tell from reading the Firefox 2 features, it never made a new impact in the 2 release. Will this impact Firefox 3? When will it be implemented, and what exactly does it mean?

Re:Tamarin

No, Tamarin is essentially getting Flash's action script engine, whichis EMCA Script 3.0 (I think), and this meaning that Firefox's javascript engine will be able to be replaced (overhauled) with the onen from Flash. The action script engine in flash is much faster and more robust than the one in Firefox currently.

Pet Peeve

"International Standards Organization (ISO)"

Intertional Organization for Standardization [wikipedia.org]

"Standard du jure" [sic]?

1) I think you mean "du jour"
2) <IndigoMantoya>I don't think "du jour" means what you think it means.</IndigoMantoya>

"du jour" simply means "of the day" ("soup du jour" => "soup of the day"). I really don't think you intended to claim that becoming the standard of the day is a good thing. I think saying, "PDF will transition from a de facto standard to an official one" would have been clearer, more succinct, and still gotten your intended point across.

Nathan

Re:"Standard du jure" [sic]?

1) I think you mean "du jour"
2) I don't think "du jour" means what you think it means.

He actually meant "de jure", not "du jure", which indeed doesn't make much sense.

From wikipedia:

De jure (in Classical Latin de iure) is an expression that means "based on law", as contrasted with de facto, which means "in fact".

source [wikipedia.org]

So what he was actually trying to say is not supposed to be French (although French, being a roman language, is indeed similar to Latin).

Nitpick alert!

So is that a standard du jour, or a de jure standard?

Great news, but not necessarily a free-for-all

It is wonderful to hear that the PDF specification will be the subject of open standardization. Caution should be exercised when implementing products though. Almost 400 patents have been granted to Adobe [uspto.gov]. Adobe has another 50 patent applications [uspto.gov] in process. There may also be additional patents that have been assigned to Adobe or that Adobe has an exclusive license to practice. Adobe may also have intellectual property in foreign markets that are greater in scope than what Adobe has in the United States.

Caution should be exercised because ISO does not require that its standards be patent-free. Necessary patents merely must be available on a reasonable and non-discriminatory [iso.org] basis. Adobe (or anyone else really) may also seek patents on how PDFs are used, manipulated, etc.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Adobe is bad or that any Open Source Software projects will ever face any obstacles from Adobe. It simply means that some care should be taken to determine whether any of Adobe's patents cover features of the PDF standard or its uses, especially when developing software that mimics an existing proprietary product. If there is a question, then OSS developers should contact Adobe to try to get a license (perhaps for the consideration of a promise that the resulting product remain open source).

Go Open and Win!

Adobe have deservedly copped criticism over the years, but one great thing they've shown by example is that if you *do* let go out of specs (as they did with PDF), you can still be a viable business. More than viable. Adobe is still the #1 name in PDF/PS, but they do so alongside competitors (GhostScript/View and the zillion PDF generation tools). Yet Adobe is still making money.

Compare that to Sun with Java. Sun just wouldn't let go, so it never got beyond being just another product that competitors had to *take down!* One of those was Microsoft, but they themselves made the same mistake with Microsoft Word. Remember how DOC files used to be the "standard" (cough) for distributing documents on the web? Now it's all either PDF or HTML. If MS had let go, maybe, people would have used that?** In the long run, when we're talking about data which *needs* to be interchangable and not tied to one software vendor, an open spec will win. Especially a better one! (PDFs look the same. Word DOCs don't!)

(Reading this and feeling good Adobe? *great*. Now please head on over to Joel and learn about user interface design http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0 000000057.html [joelonsoftware.com] Beyond [PageUp/PageDown], Adobe Reader's interface is very badly designed. The preferences make me weep and why can't I bookmark a la Visual Studio? And please stop trying to stuff every scripting concept known to humanity into the PDF spec, because all you're doing is turning PDF into the ultimate Trojan vector! Had to get that off my chest...)

Anyway, PDF and PS still rock and I'm glad they won!

** = Yes, Microsoft did make a feint with their Office XML, but everyone recognizes it for the debacle it is. Sorry Dad! ;-)

Not "open".

If Adobe throws in the towel and uses any other open document format, then they have to write off a lot of their marketable PDF technical skillset. Instead, playing the open-source benefactor is the next logical step.

This therefore does not necessarily "reinforce Adobe's commitment to open standards", it merely illustrates that it is no longer cost effective for Adobe to continue to maintain the PDF format in house.

Also, open-sourcing a mature proprietary format such as PDF (which has been driven by a single company's objectives) may divert attention from other open standards that have been developed from scratch by consensus, so it's not without it's potential downside.

Good guy or just competition?

Look Adobe for the longest time has fought making this open. Like many companies, they when a real competitor to their control comes along, then and only then will they open up. Java is a good example.

The one thing that I will give Adobe credit for is that they are at least doing it early enough so that it can make a real difference. As it is (was), most companies wait until they have no choice before doing so. Java is a good example of that. I think that had Java gone true OSS at least 6-7 years ago, sun would be in major control and Java would be unstoppable. As it is, Java is decaying as a number of the projects move to C#/mono (I am a C/C++/perl type guy).

Who knows, since more companies are jumping on the OSS AND still making money on the items, this is force others to move to true OSS. I have noticed that when I have been interviewing amongst big companies (first time a quite a while), that many now want to see my source code and they are moving a number of their projects to OSS code.

Other apps can edit PDFs now?

So I know lots of apps can print to pdf. But the only app I've seen that can open up an existing pdf and change it is Adobe's writer.

Anyone know if other apps will be able to do this now? Or if some already do? I've heard of pdftk, but it doesn't seem to actually edit the content itself.

Re:Other apps can edit PDFs now?

There are a lot of ways to edit PDFs. Sometimes it is worth converting to postscript, as you'll have even more tools. The tools below are free/open source and run on Linux. Most also work on other operating systems. If you are willing to take a proprietary solution, there are even more options:

• flpsed [ecademix.com]
• PDF Edit [petricek.net]
• KWord [koffice.org]
• Scribus [scribus.net]
• Inkscape [inkscape.org]
• GIMP [gimp.org]
• pdftk [pdfhacks.com]
• Jarnal [dklevine.com]
• Multivalent [sourceforge.net]

Well...

I know that I can print to XPS right now, but I can't print to PDF without paying 300 bones (standard edition) or 449 (professional).

It's not that people don't think of PDF as a standard - it's that it's insanely expensive to have as a "feature".

I mean seriously, think about it - you can buy a "normal" version of Office for the price of being able to export your documents to a PDF. Arguably the utility of Office applications is significantly higher than the ability to ship PDF's around.

It is also very clear from Adobe's pricing that they have you by the balls. Distiller isn't worth that much.

Not only do the creators of PDF's get screwed, the reader software (up until the latest version) has sucked hard. It had a tendency to stay open and use copious amounts of RAM even whenthere were no PDF docs being viewed. Performance wasn't really what they were after either and the ads in Reader were pretty awful too.

There is no reason that it needs to cost so much to create non-editable documents.

Re:Well...

There is no reason that it needs to cost so much to create non-editable documents.

Quite, which is why things like PDFCreator [pdfforge.org] exist.

ISO Can Be Good PDF PR

While many here already know that PDF has been an open format for a number of years, that knowledge may not be held by all in the development business. Becoming an ISO standard will be very good PR for Adobe and PDF and will go a long time towards reaching developers who didn't know it was an open standard before. If will also be good for those who have PHBs that insist that everything have the right set of acronyms associated with it!

Web 3.0 = PDF websites

Is this the next logical step?

Obligatory grammar flame

"PDF has reached a point in it's maturity cycle"

It's == It is. Its == possessive.

"a full blown du jure standard"

Either [soup] "du jour" or [practices] "de jure"?

Can't tell who's responsible for this, the linked page is Slashdotted.

Is this really the entire spec?

Does it include the features for protecting a PDF from being altered/read without the right password or whatever it is (the ones that Russian guy was arrested for).
What about the features that deal with applying black bars over text (can we build a PDF reader that completely ignores such data and see all the text that whoever did the obscuring thought was no longer readable?)

Great news!

This is great news!

Now I won't have to start endless discussions with people not liking PDF because it is 'proprietary', an argument that IMHO made no sense because Adobe has always allowed developers to use the PDF Reference as described in section 1.4 of the PDF Reference.

The only downside: I have just published a book [ugent.be] about PDF saying PDF is a de facto standard as opposed to the ISO standards PDF/X and PDF/A (read the third chapter that is available for free). If I had known this was coming, I could have asked to wait for a month and a half before printing it ;-)

The submitter talks like...

...the Open Source invented the standardization process. At least that what is seems to me when I read "but it demonstrates that open standards and open source strategies are really becoming a mainstream concept in the software industry" at an Open-Source-directed site like Slashdot.

Sorry to break your heart, folks, but that's like saying Open Source invented ISO / ANSI / IEEE / etc. A.k.a.: nonsense. The process of open industry standards predates the open source community.

I know that the Open Source community is important and all, but pretending that it invented the whole process of openness is plain silly. Stop this nonsense.

Dont confuse OpenSource with Open Standards

Let us not confuse Open Source with Open Standards with Free software.

There can be no doubt or argument that there should be only one open standard. Open meaning not owned by any entity or for-profit company. Ideally the standard should be specified and updated on behalf of all the consumers or all the people by the government or an institute chartered by it. The Standard specifying body should be completely neutral and agnostic. It should allow all players, big and small, for profit and non-profit, commercial and non commercial a level playing field. Such is the case with your nuts and bolts (SAE and DIN spec) or your engine oil or light bulbs or extension cords or ASCII encoding (not EBCDIE if any remembers that) and ANSI language specs.

Open Source, one can debate, one can agree to various extent the usefulness or the lack of it. Pros and cons you can disagree with me. As long as neither you nor I control the standards, it is a level playing field and the market and history will prove either you or me as correct. Same with free software.

Currently there are three standards being specified. Which itself is bad. OpenDoc, a microsoft thingie called OpenXML and now the OpenPDF. I like OpenXML least because it pretends to be a standard but it cant be implemented by all players without help/license from Microsoft. It has the audaucity to enshrine bugs of Office97 and Word6 and WordPerfect5 as standards . OpenDoc is already well on its way in the standards process. PDF has a much wider user installed base and has a financial muscle of a decent profit making company and its self interest. I wish PDF and OpenDoc will merge and come up with a unified standard.

Via AIM?

AdobeGrl2002: then like u put a 64-byte header blok
ISO_19_TX: thats hot

The orginal press release

TFA doesn't seem to be reachable. Here is the original Adobe press release [adobe.com].

All I want to know is...

...when can I finally get a free pdf creator/editor? I can view PDFs. I can make PDFs from other files. But I cannot edit PDFs (without the help of a pirated copy of Acrobat)? Why not?

Thanks but no thanks

Have you actually looked at a PDF file in a text editor? It's a meaningless pile of spaghetti.

Microsoft's XML Paper Specification (XPS) is already available for anyone to implement. And it's plain, readable XML instead of a 25-year-old printer description language. Your applicaiton can build files using any XML parsing engine, instead of having to license a PDF library.

Flashpaper ?

Good move Adobe ! Now, I don't want to be too solicitous, but I hope you'll do the same thing with Flashpaper.

Adobe employee responds to some raised questions

FYI, an Adobe employee responded to some questions about this and especially how it relates to Microsoft's new XPS format here [neowin.net]. (Nickull's reply should be at the top of that page)

Releasing via AIIM

Why do they need to use AOL Instant Messenger to release it? Couldn't they just set up a Torrent of the spec?

FYI

The name of the organization is: ISO - International Organization for Standardization [iso.org]. I have no idea why it's "ISO" when clearly it should be "IOS".

PGA

Instant Messenger?

it will release the entire PDF specification (current version 1.7 [CC]) to the International Standards Organization (ISO) via AIIM.

You would think they would just send an email instead of copying all of that into an instant messenger window... oh, wait...

What about the standard fonts?

Is Adobe open sourcing the standard PDF fonts (Helvetica, Times, etc.)? Font embedding is possible in PDF, but produces larger files and is a PAIN to code.

So?

Does this mean we'll see free tools to do things like create PDFs which unlock the hidden ability of Acrobat Reader to save filled-in form data?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_LiveCycle_Reade r_Extensions [wikipedia.org]
http://www.adobe.com/products/server/readerextensi ons/ [adobe.com]

Stop posting things with horrid write-ups...

I thought that it was being sent to the ISO via AIM and immediately pictured them replying, "wtfbbq?! rofl! n00bs!"

very important for OSS

This has the potential to be a very positive development for OSS. For decades, it's already been possible to read and write pdf using OSS. However, there has been a tendency for many commercial printing businesses to demand pdfs written by Adobe distiller. Others place arbitrary, undocumented limitations on what pdf files they'll accept. For instance, some apple apps write pdf files that have a lot of layers in them, and are computationally expensive to print, so printers will just bounce them back. Generally what seems to happen is that the only way to be 100% safe is to use distiller. If the customer uses distiller, then he figures, "Hey, distiller wrote it, so you damn well better be able to print it." The printer responds to that by setting their criteria so that distiller-written docs tend to be ok. Also, adobe is always a few steps ahead of everybody else in the sophistication of their pdf implementation, so distiller-generated pdfs may be less buggy, or better optimized so they aren't computationally expensive to render. Inside the docutech or whatever, the printer is probably running some version of adobe reader, so it's also likely that adobe-generated pdf will be the most compatible with adobe's own reader.

For these reasons, standardization could be a boon to people writing pdfs with OSS. People can now say, "Hey, it follows the standard, so you damn well better be able to print it." I'm not familiar with the different flavors of pdf referred to in the /. summary, but it may be that adobe is making an effort to define standard subsets of the language for various purposes. If that's what's actually happening, it could be a good thing, because instead of setting their own undocumented criteria, printers could start saying "We accept subset $foo of pdf."

AFAIK, the biggest remaining fly in the ointment is color management. If you want to do high-end color management, you basically don't have any options with OSS, because of patents.

Re:How to resize PDF ?

PDF is fine for what is was designed for: creating print documents. But I hate pdf when reading it on the screen as it won't fit my window width: either you have to scroll back and forth every line or the characters are too small to read. Is there any app that can 'uncompile' a pdf and fit it on a screen width ? Might be a great app for reading docs on a laptop/pda/cell phone.

pdftotxt

pdftohtml
or
pdftk
The last one is more to let you edit a pdf, but they are all really useful when dealing with pdf file.

Re:Oh dear God.

I like plain text or html files much better, they are far more efficient, reliable and compatible.

Plain text and HTML are far from "compatible". You lose formatting, layout, and readibility not to mention that those formats don't print very well. Another thing that you lose is the permanence of it. I can scan a signed document into PDF and be assured it will stay the same. The only wat to achieve that is to use HTML (a 50% reduction in your choices right off the bat) and scan it as an image.

B.

Re:The rol of GTK+

This has very little to do with adobe's pdf reader (which is one of the worst). Why not use kpdf, that uses qt and works considerably better. PDF being an open standard means that there are plenty of programs which support it.

Re:Oh dear God.

Yes, a 100 MB application to read text seems a bit much. I use Foxit Reader. Just 2 MB, very fast.

Re:How to resize PDF ?

Is there any app that can 'uncompile' a pdf and fit it on a screen width?

No, technical discussions of the format aside.

As an end user, it would help if you consider the format a FINAL format (for viewing, printing, distribution, etc.), and treat the authoring of it as entirely separate. It's really quite obvious, but the modern widespread use of wordprocessing software (which typically combines the two separate steps in an unholy but manageable mess) has led to the confusion. Put another way, your question comes up frequently.

By contrast, those accustomed to separating the two steps (editing text and adding markup, on the one hand, and generating output as postscript, PDF, HTML, formatted text such as man pages, etc., on other), never ask the question and typically scratch their heads when they see it asked. PDFs are typically generated into letter and A4 sizes. Reading them on screen isn't ideal, agreed, but it's unlikely there will ever be a big push for everyone to provide 6x9 or smaller versions. Perhaps one day in the future when screen technology improves and becomes widespread, but not now.

You consolation prize is that you can, with little trouble, extract the text from a PDF. You can use that to re-author a new PDF, or read it as is. But that brings you back full circle to "plain text", doesn't it? The tangential lesson here is there is a reason why *nix users continue to insist on using the command line, and spend much of their time mucking about with text files, and the rest of it arguing about text editors. Text (ascii, if you will), is the lowest common denominator for people and computers. The two get along quite nicely. You could say that processing text is what it's all about. Oddly, enough, computer programs are written in text, and their output is often more text. ;-)

There is a book called Unix Text Processing (written by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly) that was first published in 1987. To a large degree, it's as relevant and useful today as it was back then, years before Microsoft released Windows 95 to the world. If you buy a copy on amazon.com (for under $2.00, typically), you can learn how to make your own PDFs and never have to ask the question again.

Re:Oh dear God.

I don't understand comments like this... Adobe's reader does suck, badly, but it's only a reference implementation adobe make available to demonstrate the format. If you want a better PDF reader, there are loads out there and your free to write your own if none of them suit you.
The default preview app in OSX works well, and i often use kpdf under Linux, but there are many PDF readers for pretty much every platform in existance, there's even a PDF reader for AmigaOS, and no adobe don't make an official one for Amiga.

Re:Update to office 2007

wow, I haven't heard the term wysiwyg in a very long time. People have become so used to them, they forget that current word processors are a gift compared to volkswriter. Now how much did I date myself in this field with that comment?

Re:Not already a standard

There are a lot of definitions of 'standard,' but I think PDF should qualify, since it met the following requirements:

1. Defined by a specification, not an implementation.
2. The specification is free for download.
3. The specification is unencumbered, and can be used for any purpose.

I could also add 'more than one compatible implementation exists' to the list. With this announcement, Adobe have added 'controlled by a standards body' to the list. This is quite important, but it only effects future versions of the standard, not the current ones, so it doesn't have immediate effect.

Re:How to resize PDF ?

PDF is fine for what is was designed for: creating print documents. But I hate pdf when reading it on the screen as it won't fit my window width: either you have to scroll back and forth every line or the characters are too small to read. Is there any app that can 'uncompile' a pdf and fit it on a screen width ? Might be a great app for reading docs on a laptop/pda/cell phone.

In Adobe Reader you can select 'Reflow' from the View menu. For best results the PDF needs to contain document structuring tags. The PDF specification supports reflowing text however not all PDF generators embed the necessary tags to allow the viewer to correctly reflow the text.