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As mentioned in this previous story http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/27/ 0128236, photoshop is one of the most desired linux ports.

It's an awesome application. I'm no expert, but i've seen my sister who's into graphics play with the latest photoshop version, and I tell you MS isn't gonna beat that product just because they want to. Take a look at this tutorial video http://media.studio.adobe.com/linked_content/en/ac s2ttL08/phscs2ttvpgrid.mov or many others on http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/newfeature s.html.

People may be inclined to use whichever browser or media player comes preinstalled (because in the end any browser does the job, alghough us techies may be picky) but this is different. People who buy Photoshop (which costs several hundred bucks) are mostly doing professional-level work with graphics or photography, and they use photoshop because it is the best product around. Even if MS can come out with a half-decent basic graphics app you can use to remove red-eye fron your pics they're not going to take much of a chunk of photoshop's profits. I think it's a big waste of MS money.

It seems the product do not even aim at being a photoshop-like application. Maybe this has changed since the beta, but the main purpose was vectorial graphism.

Microsoft is not even talking on its website about anything that could position it against Photoshop.
Just see by yourself

http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/gr aphic_designer/gd_features.aspx
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/overview.h tml

When you tried to 'kill' another product, you generally start to match its features, in this case, both feature list have almost nothing in common.

For me that doesn't make more sense that saying Adobe Illustrator is a Photoshop killer.

BTW, this has already been discussed:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/11/185123 1

So? When I was in college I was 'forced' to buy a bunch of textbooks. They were my property, but the University mandated I used a particular set of books that the professors had chosen to teach from. It's really no different.

It is very different. First of all, you had the option to buy the books second-hand most of the time, reducing the cost of the books to you. There's not really a good option out there for buying a second-hand laptop that will be able to keep up with the latest programs (especially graphics and video). Secondly, you also had the option to take the book out of the library (school or public), and not pay anything at all. Please remember that the average college/university student doesn't have a lot of money. It's possible to budget in $1,000USD or more for textbooks -- it's even covered by many student loans and bursaries. But how about this kind of budget:

Mac 2GHz Intel Core Duo: $2,499.00
Microsoft Office 2004 -- Student and Teacher Edition (For Mac): $149.99
Adobe Photoshop CS2: $649.00
Total: $3297.99

That's the absolute minimum that an average graphics design student would have to spend, on top of textbooks. Doing any courses in animation or web design? Expect to spend $699 on Adobe After Effects or $999 on the Macromedia Suite. Video editing? That's $849 for Adobe Premiere Pro if you're running Windows or $1,299 for Final Cut Studio for Mac. God forbid you have to buy your another (larger) monitor, peripherals, an OS, or your course requires you to use Media 100 or Avid. Soon you're paying more for your laptop than you paid for your whole school year in residence (including meal plan), tuition, and possibly your entire school experience combined!

One of the primary reasons that schools offer computer labs is because most students cannot afford to buy the requisite hardware and software. Schools pool resources from the government and tuitions in order to get computer labs, which is something that an individual cannot do. Schools also get trememdous discounts on the products and liscences that they buy because they buy in bulk.

Please remember that many of us went through school on student loans and part-time jobs. Where I live (Ontario, Canada), they have decreased what the government-sponsored loans will lend out, and even bank loans (which have to be co-signed by your parents) are limited. The average student can hope to receive about $6,000CAD max from the government, and maybe another $8,000CAD from the bank, and, if you're lucky, a couple of hundred bucks a paycheck from a part-time job. This has to last you for lodging, food, tuition, and supplies for eight months. Can you imagine what a $3,000 (minimum) mandatory laptop will take out of your ability to pay for things like, say, food?

Also, think about the tech support necessary to keep everyone's computer running smoothly when every numbnuts out there has administrative privileges. Books don't exactly require support. If the school doesn't provide the technical support, then a large percent of student-owned laptops will be out for service so much that they're rendered useless for educational purposes.

So? When I was in college I was 'forced' to buy a bunch of textbooks. They were my property, but the University mandated I used a particular set of books that the professors had chosen to teach from. It's really no different.

It is very different. First of all, you had the option to buy the books second-hand most of the time, reducing the cost of the books to you. There's not really a good option out there for buying a second-hand laptop that will be able to keep up with the latest programs (especially graphics and video). Secondly, you also had the option to take the book out of the library (school or public), and not pay anything at all. Please remember that the average college/university student doesn't have a lot of money. It's possible to budget in $1,000USD or more for textbooks -- it's even covered by many student loans and bursaries. But how about this kind of budget:

Mac 2GHz Intel Core Duo: $2,499.00
Microsoft Office 2004 -- Student and Teacher Edition (For Mac): $149.99
Adobe Photoshop CS2: $649.00
Total: $3297.99

That's the absolute minimum that an average graphics design student would have to spend, on top of textbooks. Doing any courses in animation or web design? Expect to spend $699 on Adobe After Effects or $999 on the Macromedia Suite. Video editing? That's $849 for Adobe Premiere Pro if you're running Windows or $1,299 for Final Cut Studio for Mac. God forbid you have to buy your another (larger) monitor, peripherals, an OS, or your course requires you to use Media 100 or Avid. Soon you're paying more for your laptop than you paid for your whole school year in residence (including meal plan), tuition, and possibly your entire school experience combined!

One of the primary reasons that schools offer computer labs is because most students cannot afford to buy the requisite hardware and software. Schools pool resources from the government and tuitions in order to get computer labs, which is something that an individual cannot do. Schools also get trememdous discounts on the products and liscences that they buy because they buy in bulk.

Please remember that many of us went through school on student loans and part-time jobs. Where I live (Ontario, Canada), they have decreased what the government-sponsored loans will lend out, and even bank loans (which have to be co-signed by your parents) are limited. The average student can hope to receive about $6,000CAD max from the government, and maybe another $8,000CAD from the bank, and, if you're lucky, a couple of hundred bucks a paycheck from a part-time job. This has to last you for lodging, food, tuition, and supplies for eight months. Can you imagine what a $3,000 (minimum) mandatory laptop will take out of your ability to pay for things like, say, food?

Also, think about the tech support necessary to keep everyone's computer running smoothly when every numbnuts out there has administrative privileges. Books don't exactly require support. If the school doesn't provide the technical support, then a large percent of student-owned laptops will be out for service so much that they're rendered useless for educational purposes.

So? When I was in college I was 'forced' to buy a bunch of textbooks. They were my property, but the University mandated I used a particular set of books that the professors had chosen to teach from. It's really no different.

It is very different. First of all, you had the option to buy the books second-hand most of the time, reducing the cost of the books to you. There's not really a good option out there for buying a second-hand laptop that will be able to keep up with the latest programs (especially graphics and video). Secondly, you also had the option to take the book out of the library (school or public), and not pay anything at all. Please remember that the average college/university student doesn't have a lot of money. It's possible to budget in $1,000USD or more for textbooks -- it's even covered by many student loans and bursaries. But how about this kind of budget:

Mac 2GHz Intel Core Duo: $2,499.00
Microsoft Office 2004 -- Student and Teacher Edition (For Mac): $149.99
Adobe Photoshop CS2: $649.00
Total: $3297.99

That's the absolute minimum that an average graphics design student would have to spend, on top of textbooks. Doing any courses in animation or web design? Expect to spend $699 on Adobe After Effects or $999 on the Macromedia Suite. Video editing? That's $849 for Adobe Premiere Pro if you're running Windows or $1,299 for Final Cut Studio for Mac. God forbid you have to buy your another (larger) monitor, peripherals, an OS, or your course requires you to use Media 100 or Avid. Soon you're paying more for your laptop than you paid for your whole school year in residence (including meal plan), tuition, and possibly your entire school experience combined!

One of the primary reasons that schools offer computer labs is because most students cannot afford to buy the requisite hardware and software. Schools pool resources from the government and tuitions in order to get computer labs, which is something that an individual cannot do. Schools also get trememdous discounts on the products and liscences that they buy because they buy in bulk.

Please remember that many of us went through school on student loans and part-time jobs. Where I live (Ontario, Canada), they have decreased what the government-sponsored loans will lend out, and even bank loans (which have to be co-signed by your parents) are limited. The average student can hope to receive about $6,000CAD max from the government, and maybe another $8,000CAD from the bank, and, if you're lucky, a couple of hundred bucks a paycheck from a part-time job. This has to last you for lodging, food, tuition, and supplies for eight months. Can you imagine what a $3,000 (minimum) mandatory laptop will take out of your ability to pay for things like, say, food?

Also, think about the tech support necessary to keep everyone's computer running smoothly when every numbnuts out there has administrative privileges. Books don't exactly require support. If the school doesn't provide the technical support, then a large percent of student-owned laptops will be out for service so much that they're rendered useless for educational purposes.

Um, PDF has been able to embed Flash content for a while now -- since well before Adobe bought Macromedia.

One example:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/pdfs/a7_trym e_gb.pdf

Does the PDF standard belong to Adobe? - Yes, but they publish the standard in enough detail so that anyone can use it to read/write standard PDFs. See http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html

Do they charge for this, their patents pertaining to PDF, etc? - No, not as long as you're trying to be compliant with the PDF standard. See http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/adobe-ipr-draft-zille s-pdf.txt

Adobe could have created a proprietary format and tried to defend it via patents, but they haven't. They could have also tried to make money off of 3rd parties trying to create PDF reader/writers by charging for patent licenses, but they haven't.
This is the reason that the PDF format (and, by association, Adobe) is the leader in this area.

PDF belongs to adobe and to develop using it you have to pay them for their patents use. So if you want to distribute yourself some PDF that's OK but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money. And that's just leading to more and more lockin.

Utter rubbish. A number of different libraries capable of generating and working with PDF documents are available; for a free (as in beer and speech) Java one, look no further than Apache's own FOP.

Adobe's desktop applications (eg Distiller) are pay-for, yes, but there are no patents or other licensing issues; the PDF spec is freely available if you want to write your own implementation.

Isn't the whole point that you're able to view the same document, on screen and printed out, across a wide range of platforms, and they'll all look identical?

Adobe's PDF's ability to use javascript is for simple things like form validation and contacting websites. It can be used to authenicate a user trying to read a document with a security server, for example.

PDF's come a long way since I looked at it last. I suggest looking at their livecycle products, or check out their employee blogs

Adobe has recently released its Intelligent Document Platform which gives PDFs the ability to use javascript and imbed things within their PDFs, along with the ability to use submission and make PDFs dynamic on the web.

And considering that Adobe recently purchased Macromedia, its only a matter of time before they have flash embedded and working solidly in PDFs.

Unipage is already waaay behind (like Hemos said, they don't have the solid installbase), and will have to come up with something extremely impressive that Adobe won't be able to copy.

I see this as vaporware before it even comes to release 1.0.

You misunderstand us, my friend. It's only a select few of us who want to make "users switch from MS to free stuff". We don't care what you use, we just want people to realize that there are other options.

Too many people bitch and moan about how much MS software freezes and other things, and so we tell them that Linux is more stable (because, at least in my experience, it is). Some people might complain about the graphics tools that come with Windows and Office, and so we tell them about GIMP (which, undeniably, is MUCH more powerful than anything that comes with Windows or Office). People get pissed at IE for all its problems, we point them to Firefox or Mozilla.

Not that we want these people to switch if what they're using works for them, but we don't want to have to listen to their bitching and complaining about how IE sucks, how they hate having to reformat Windows, how WinXP and Office are so expensive, etc.

I'm more than happy with The GIMP, but if you're willing to shell out an extra $600 or so for Photoshop (which appears to be its going price) just because it has CMYK, I have no problem with that - certainly that price tag is way too high for my liking, but I'm not buying it so that's not my problem. . .

And as far as what you said about usability goes. . . we're programmers, not usability experts. MS and other software companies actually have experts that advise on how to make software easy to use. Many OS projects don't have that, and many never will.

Why?

"Usability isn't that difficult". Says you. Says me, and a million other programmers. Do you see the problem with this thinking? It's human nature. "Well it's easy for me to use." Of course, as a programmer, MY interface makes sense to me. It's never going to get fixed because the people who see it as a problem don't want to fix the code, and the people who are willing to fix the code don't see it as a problem.

rather than plonk down $2,000 for photoshop.

Whoa... Are people scalping Photoshop on EBay now? The full version of PS is $650. Adobe's entire Creative Suite (PS, Acrobat, Illustrator, InDesign, and GoLive) is still "only" $1200.

Photoshop CS2 is a 32-bit application.

AFAIK, Adobe never got beyond carbonization... (when Photoship 'thinks,' you still see the wristwatch (when launched, for example, you'll see the wristwatch unless you mouse over the photoshop launch window). I suppose a carbonized app is technically a native application on G3, G4, &G5 PowerPC's, but it was supposed to be a temporary solution for developers. We were expecting them to completely re-write their application (like Quark did). But they didn't. Bums.

I think this could be the opportunity for a Photoshop killer to arise. Photoshop, while I do not deny its power to do whatever I may need to do to an image, is getting long in the tooth. Yes, still a valid contender (obviously), but at this late version, hasn't anyone else noticed that it could use a re-design of its interface (which I think is almost clumsy now)? When I got CS2, the first thing I noticed, and applauded, was a key combo for "Image Size...". I've wanted that since v4!!! WTF took them so long?

I mean, say a new version of Photoshop is released. The old one still works fine, so why upgrade?

And by the way, if you're seriously considering .NET on Windows 98/ME, go back to it.

Point is, upgrades are a good thing, and on Linux, they're free.

But then, that's why I use the Gimp anyway...

So in what way are they not open? The PDF specs have been available from Adobe since the very beginning. Macromedia also offered the SWF specs for download (although it was a bit tortuous to get at them). So how are they not open? It doesn't get much more open than that.

http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html got suitable plugins for browsers/OS of choice.

Notice that I got SVG plugin installed for ages, Safari didn't display the graphs. Is it because I am not using "a browser with CSS"? Well, nevermind really...

This is the thing why I and others have negative views against firefox, svg and even .ogg. Rootless promotion of this kind...

The graphs showed up once I installed the Adobe SVG Viewer: http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html

And IE6 + ASV6 (http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/beta.html ) doesn't work either. All the graphs are blank, and if I go directly to svg by url, I get a big black rectangle.

I vote this as the worst use of svg on the internet.

But that's going to come to a screeching halt. Considering their plans are to combine PDF, Flash and HTML into a single player. Yeah that will work well considering the absolute garbage they've made Acrobat Reader into. Straight from the horses as--uh mouth:

What are Adobe's plans for Flash Player and Adobe Reader? Our long-term plan is to develop a "universal client" by combining PDF, Flash and HTML in a single, integrated runtime. Of course, we will continue delivering the Flash Player as a small, efficient runtime for content and applications on the web, and Adobe Reader for viewing and interacting with PDF documents and forms. The integration of these technologies into a unified framework creates a ubiquitous platform that runs on virtually every device, and dramatically expands the opportunities to create compelling solutions.

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobe andmacromedia_faq.html

You mean, It kind of depends on Sun and Adobe. http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobe andmacromedia.html

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html

CS2 is still a 32-bit app, both on the PC and the Mac, and can't thus can't use more than 4 gigs - in fact, it won't use more than about 3, because right about in there is the limit as to what the OS can hand it, with the exact amount depending on hardware as well as running software. You can try to enable a 3-gig split on XP with SP2, but Photoshop itself is still 32-bit, and has the inherant memory-allocation limitations. Considering the mathematical nature of what Photoshop does, I would imagine that working in 64-bit could also give a noticeable performance boost.

While the OS can run 32-bit and 64-bit apps on an A64, current 64-bit versions of windows require 64-bit drivers. I don't believe that a 64-bit program (the kernel) can use code from a 32-bit DLL, as you'd be switching the same program between 64- and 32-bit modes in the middle of execution. Of course, I could be wrong.

steve

no, you are not allowed to peek at those links either... ;)

I've been waiting for native SVG support for a long time. When you had mentioned that it worked in FireFox 1.5+ I immediately went to http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/svgtest.ht ml to see if it worked. Sadly, it did not. Am I doing something incorrectly?

They use studies and examples to show that not only is x-height important to legibility, but ascenders and descenders are also vital. Compromising the ascenders of a font with increased x-height (such as in University Roman) can decrease the legibility. What's most important is a balance between x-height, and ascender/descender size.

The ascender/descender relationship to legibility/readability is also WHY IT IS MORE DIFFICULT TO READ TEXT IN ALL-CAPS, EVEN THOUGH IT HAS THE LARGEST X-HEIGHT OF ALL.

Overall, they found that sans and serif fonts are roughly equal in readability, with serifs having a slight advantage depending on the size of the font.

Though the article is written more towards print typography, the summary advice applies to web as well.

Set..text in one of the hundreds of standard text faces, at a reasonable size--usually between 9- and 12-point. ... Use a measure that allows for 60 to 70 characters per line. ... Indent paragraphs by one em or a pica.

Tell me, what major sites have been build using Ruby?

I can list several very high volume sites/applications that use Perl.

embedding Flash "things" in PDF files

You can already do this. A simple example: If you have Acrobat, go to File > Create PDF > From Web Page, enter the URL of a site with Flash on it (www.adobe.com works great), and click Create. The created PDF will contain the Flash movie and it will play perfectly within the PDF.

But embedded Flash isn't specific to converted web pages, or to Flash movies only -- PDF natively supports embedded multimedia formats in much the same way as browsers do. You can even turn architectural drawings into navigatable 3D environments inside your PDF, so that when you print the PDF it looks like an architect's design plan, but when you're on a more capable environment (a PC), you can actually see the perspective.

That said, there's certainly lots of room for new integration between PDF and Flash. But I'm not sure what shape it will take!

Disclaimer: While I am an Adobe employee, the above post is my own and any perspectives are mine and not necessarily those of Adobe.

I hope it's not the end of Freehand, it's far better for tracing bitmaps to vectors than illustrator.

Have you ever tried Streamline? In this little gem of a program, bitmap tracing actually works! They've discontinued it now though, and merged it with Illustrator CS2.

What would be nice is if Adobe starts to integrate their powerhouse bitmap transforming & rendering technologies into Flash.

Actually, Adobe already tried this with Flash competitor called Live Motion. It was a tool that had great potential, but it couldn't make inroads into the market that Flash totally dominated. Adobe admitted defeat and pulled it from market in 2003.

PDF is an open format.

10 years and still no CMYK support, which incidentally is the key feature which is holding the GIMP back from becoming a serious contender with photoshop. One would think that someone or some group would see the value of such a feature in a free software graphics program and have it implemented. If for nothing else then to save money and have a better bargaining position when dealing with vendors of propriatery notoriety.

Those who rate linux low must at least admit it keeps Microsoft honest.

I think this has more to do with Adobe then Linux.

Adobe Type Manager Light

Next time, check prior art before appropriating a phrase and giving it whatever meaning you feel like.

Not to mention, "Type Manager" is a terrible name for "application that manages files of some type".

I hope I'm not the only one that had to wonder what iTunes and amaroK had to do with Adobe Type Manager and Suitcase.

The way that they really get you is when you pay for your staff to learn this software though professional Adobe training, which will also require Adobe books.

Of course, there are tons of other book makers out there. Take a look at any bookstore-- the Photoshop section is overwhelming. By making a difficult, yet powerful program that everyone wants to use, they have created a whole new market.

You want frustrating? Try using 3D-Studio Max without any training or extra books. Good luck with that one! This trend is lousy, and it really hurts educators who have to teach this stuff to students without these textbooks. Most of the time, I just request a free desk copy, and use that to teach the essentials to my students. (By the way, that is one of the few sweet perks to teaching!) know_op Move Sig

Sounds like what Dvorak is after is something like Adobe PhotoDeluxe which Adobe discontinued in favour of Elements.

Or open pdfs.

Actually, you *could* open and view PDFs on a IIIx -- Adobe has a Reader version for Palm devices starting from OS 1.1: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrpalmdloa d.html. Now, as pointed out below, you would not really want to -- too slow, too small, and reader itself toakes too much space.

Actually there was a high end Acrobat server they had on Linux years ago. It did lots of cool stuff IIRC but started out @ around $5,000.00 per seat. They did not have a demo available for download then and I dunno if it still exists.

It looks like it still does.

This has nothing to do with adobe and photoshop.

This has everything to do with companies like Bibble Labs, Phase One, iView Multimedia who all make 'raw workflow' software.

For those of you who are new, or don't care, or don't use RAW workflow it's about the post processing that most enthusiast, semi-pro, and pros doin once the pictures are taken and before they're edited in Photoshop (if needed).

Photoshop has something included that has been showing up in the last few versions, they call it adobe camera raw but it is rasterized out of camera RAW and then you edit it like you would any other image.

What Aperture, and the others let you do is 'pre-process' your image to do lossless corrections to things such as white balance, color cast, cropping, etc. If you make any of these types of changes inside photoshop once you import in the RAW file you are doing it with data loss.

This is a step before photoshop, not a slap in the face and replacement.

This is condiments to the burger. The burger is much more filling than just the condiments, but the condiments aren't all that by itself

...but when they do, they'll guarantee that the living hell is confused out of of camera buffs, Macheads, Photoshop users, and, well, just about every search engine on the planet.

"Your problem is that you didn't correctly set the aperture on your G5, which accounts for the bad results in Aperture on your G5. That's because aperture data isn't recorded in the Aperture suite, so creative professionals should use Creative Suite, and don't even think of swapping your iPod Photo for a G5 and the Zen player made by these guys, and be thankful that Creative doesn't make a sound card for the G5 either.

Who the hell hired Bjarne Stroustroup as a product marketing specialist, and why, dear, God, why, did he accept? :)

I'm speaking as/for a commercial developer which already has a working port on Linux of a very large and powerful app but can't release because of the license mess the linux GUI/OS is in.

Licence mess? Hmmm...

Have you looked at projects like FLTK, wxWindows, Tk from Tcl/Tk, TIX, the Adobe Source Libraries, or Mozilla's XUL and XPFE etc? It's definitely possible to develop closed-source GUI software on X11 with a range of widget sets without violating licences.

And really, if you're developing closed-source software and want the KDE look-and-feel, you can always purchase a Qt developer licence instead of opensourcing your code.

There is no one-true-widget-set which forces you to open-source your code. The closest thing to a "one-true-widget-set-for-X11", it would be Motif - and even that is free if you're developing for Linux - see OpenMotif...

This isn't a load time problem. It's a load crap problem.

"Loading and verifying WebBuy.api" (does anyone ever use WebBuy, Adobe's DRM system for PDF documents?)
"Checking for updates" (Adobe might have changed the format of PDF again.)
Loading ad content for toolbar. (Sigh.)

And then all the crap that's being downloaded has to be scanned for viruses. It's all that junk that's the problem.

Of course, OpenOffice isn't all that great on launch time either. And no, loading it at boot time isn't the answer.

It seems that the defect has to be potentially life-threatening for HP to react. I have an HP ZD7000 laptop. There is a known fault in something to do with the RAM controller wherein - if you have the secondary RAM slot filled - the laptop will reboot or shutdown spontaneously in instances of applications that have heavy memory usage (I'm assuming those that have requirements of memory from both slots). Generally the problems have been noticed in photoshop, but I've had them occur in GIMP or some games. Others have been experiencing the same problems. Adobe has a warning on this.

So I've contacted HP technical support about this. I've talked on the phone, and then by email. The representative from HP assured me that no such issue existed, and we back-and-forthed for awhile. Eventually, I found this article on HP's own website. When I emailed it to the HP rep, he prompted stopped answering my emails.


Maybe if my battery had exploded I would have gotten better support from HP, but it seems it has to be a big issue for them to do anything about it.

"HP fully stands behind the products it makes?" Maybe, but only when it looks like it might lose them money due to lawsuits or poses a health risk.

Never had a crash?

I'm using 1.0.7 at home on Windows and I crash every time I visit this url from adobe.

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/main.h tml

Anyone have this problem? I haven't done much to my copy, except for the usual extensions.

Autodesk acquires Alias?

Imagine for a moment, what would happen if Adobe decided to take over Macromedia. It's a silly, far-fetched idea.

Wha? Oh, nevermind.

Yes, it is.

10 years down the road when everything is in PDF format, whose to stop them from charging us to view material in their format?

Adobe has made their money the old-fashioned way, by making tools that work well, rather than by locking people into a format. GhostScript, among others, will read those PDF's with or without Adobe.

Apple are not innovate with OSx and PDF / vector screen technolgy they inherited the technology when they acquired Next that used postscript to display the screen.

http://www.osdata.com/oses/next.htm i wish people would stop quotin apple or google as innovative - they may be better at getting things to market but they are not innovative.

Desktop search & indexing - shipped in Windows 2000 long before google...
Satellite mapping - terraserver setup in the nineties!

And why we are on the anti-rant here - why doesn everyone confuse open and free

PDF is a proprietary format it is not open, though it might be able to be licesed for free
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/lib rary/index.html;jsessionid=0FE102393BB2EE6D4FB30BF 3E38FEBAA

make no mistake, those that have implemented PDF and haven't licensed it from PDF are in breach of IP. Just becasue adobe choose to do nothing about it doesn't mean the standard is 'open'

Adobe's spec allows you to embed a digital signature in a PDF.

Freedom? Since when is treating one proprietary format (.pdf) different than another (MS' .doc, .xls, etc) "Freedom"?

Had you actually read the article you'd know that those responsible for the decision are aware of this:

"On the question of why Adobe's PDF format meets the definition of "open format", state officials said it was a "grey area" but that Adobe's legal and licensing terms were deemed sufficiently open."

It's consederably more open than the MS formats :

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html

"The PDF specification was first published when Adobe® Acrobat® was introduced in 1993. Since then, updated versions of the PDF Reference have been made available from Adobe via the Web. A significant number of developers and systems integrators offer customized enhancements and extensions to Adobe's core family of products. Adobe publishes the PDF specification to foster the creation of an ecosystem around the PDF format. The PDF Reference provides a description of the Portable Document Format and is intended for application developers wishing to develop applications that create PDF files directly, as well as read or modify PDF document content."

Do I agree with you that the pdf decision can be considered problematic? Yes, absolutely, however there aren't that many alternatives, are there, whereas there are alternatives to MS formats.

Since the spec is published and there exist independant (open source) implementations of that spec, I would consider it "open". Apparently so do Adobe and Massachusetts. It doesn't have to be governed by comittee or some non-profit to be open (to me). PDF is fully documented, and anyone can make their own implementation. That's a fully open format.

Please, do tell us how PDF is a closed format. Bloated yes, awkward yes, not suitable (and not meant) for editing yes, but closed?

Ok just going to answer #2, as I dislike Access too much to give an unbiased opinion on #1.

The PDF standard is in all actuality a "Generic format" as you term it. You see there might be a proprietary reader such as Acrobat required to view the document. However there is nothing preventing others from creating their own PDF reader application. The spec's on the PDF format are well known and published on the Adobe website (http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/in dex_reference.html).

There are plenty of other PDF viewers around if you look. There is no need to use Acrobat to view a PDF document. On Linux you could use Xpdf, or gPDF to view the file. On the MacOS you could use the bundled Preview application. If you really don't want to use the Acrobat PDF reader for Windows any longer (I'm making the assumption that you're running Windows based on you not realizing that there are other options, I could easily be wrong here) I would suggest that you check out GSView (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/index.htm) or perhaps FoxIt (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php). Not that these are the only options available, just the first few I found. ;-)

Just because there is one widely known reader for a format does not mean that it is a closed format.

Gremlin