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Sun Microsystems' James Gosling created a displayed PostScript as the basis for NeWS around 1985. This implementation was never particularly Adobe/Apple-PostScript compatible and was only licensed from Adobe shortly before Sun abandoned it. However it was the first use of PostScript for a windowing system.

NeXT then licensed & underwrote development of PostScript into Display PostScript (no direct relation to displayed PostScript.) This was the basis for NeXT's NextStep interface and lives on today in GNUstep.

Apple has recently independantly implemented the PostScript-derived PDF from public specifications for it's Quartz rendering layer in it's recently released MacOS X.

Thus you've a single well known, well documented language that's been used for three independant windowing systems over the course of 15 years, two of them independant of the language's licensors. Add that to it's direct application to printing and it's a pretty powerful argument for further consideration as an X-Window alternative/successor.

Am I missing something here, or did anyone else notice that the printable-image files of their mascot are in proprietary formats in proprietary compressed archives?

Wow, Bob's been entrenched in Linuxland for quite a while. Aldus Pagemaker has been Adobe Pagemaker for years now.
--

Have a look at this page from Adobe's online guide to colour theory. It's very informative and should help clear things up.

Adobe Dimensions (wireframe and other 3D to postscript)

An SGI Article on how to render OpenGL to postscript (with examples and source)

GLP (another OpenGL to PostScript app w/ source)

Adobe Dimensions is probably your best bet. Hope one of them works for you.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,

Will Adobe Illustrator support Mac OSX?

Adobe is committed to supporting the next version of the Mac operating system in future product versions, including Adobe Illustrator.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is the preferred W3C standard for vector graphics. I recommend converting to this standard instead. You can get Adobe's free SVG viewer for Netscape/IE (Mac/Windows-only though). Mozilla also comes with SVG support (although you usually have to add it in yourself from the codebase -- haven't checked the latest 0.8 for inclusion though). There are numerous programs for UNIX that do SVG import/export (almost all the major Qt/GTK+ vector graphics programs do), and support seems to be increasing in Windows programs (although I haven't seen it in Visio, but I might be one version back now).

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

I need file compatibility with the maximum number of people

If that's your biggest reason for choosing Office, have you considered HTML or LaTeX? HTML can be viewed or printed using any Web browser, and LaTeX can be edited on any machine with Emacs (includes Windows), compiled into a PDF, and viewed or printed on any platform that has an Acrobat Reader.

The general "if it is on my computer I can copy it" argument still stands in this case. But your HTML-specific methods fail to apply.

Well, consider GIMP. It attempts to mimic some of the things that PhotoShop can do. But, and here is the crucial point, it's not about innovational new features. The new features are produced by the commercial developers, and are then copied.

So when GIMP dominates the market, there is not enough money to be made by commercial developers to continue development, where does the innovation come from?

The same can be said for a multitude of Open Source projects, they're about producing free versions of commercial products, not about producing something new and excitingly different. Harsh, but true.

How did you guys integrate PDF... You have questions about PDF? You can DOWNLOAD the spec for free. Apple is trying to please a lot of people. They won't please everyone... certainly not hippydippy GNU purists who don't grasp the point of BSD-style open source licenses. And the Law of Averages states that no Apple employee who actually uses the Frameworks and function calls every day is going to be slick and articulate enough to field questions from the army of developers down to the level of detail that you seem to want. RTFM. You might have to learn something new, God forbid.

When some numb-nut sends me a document in Word or Powerpoint of whatever and my open software won't open it I just send it up to http://createpdf.adobe.com and they mail back a nice PDF of it.

They let you do three documents as a trial, then its $10/mo or $100/year.

They handle many of the popular but proprietary formats.

And for goodness sake, stop reading slashdot and get out and VOTE!

Condorcet's criticisms are but a quibble. See Arrow's Impossibility Theorem for real problems.
NP

Imagine a utility that would convert your docs to a crossplatform (*NIX, MacOS, Win32) information container - one that would allow true device and platform independance, as well as allow internal and external hyperlinking, presentation-style slideshows, full Unicode support, and it should be an open standard.

What would this magic format be called? PDF, maybe?

There is already at least one OSS engine for directly creating PDF without using any Adobe products, either:ReportLab

Call me a luddite, but I'm not certain what YAFF will provide in the long run, other than splintering the non-.DOC users further. Adobe may be an evil, greedy, closed-source corporation, but PDF as a file spec is open and documented. Also current viewer products have no troubles (that I've seen) with much older versions of the file format. PDF allows for indexing of documents for fast searches, bookmark creation for a table of contents/index, thumbnail creation for quick navigation, granular document security (allow some/none/all modification), and can be entirely self contained (supports RLE, LZW and JPEG encoding for embedded graphics), allowing a PDF to look the same anywhere it is viewed and be easily transferrable.

Disclaimer: I distribute everything in PDF. My resume, invoices, proposals and other similar things. The only problem I have is trying to be polite when people ask why I don't use Word.

PS: anyone who feels that PDAs are a limiting factor in the use of PDF - huh? They're grand for PIM/phone/GPS/GameBoy functionality, but who really wants to slog through a tech ref manual (or equiv.) on the thing? I'm honestly curious, not trying to flame.

There's also a web-based form here for those who may not use Micros~1 products. I just submitted this URL to it, but I'm still waiting on a response. I guess it takes their server a while to process a 9 MB file...

There's also a web-based form here for those who may not use Micros~1 products. I just submitted this URL to it, but I'm still waiting on a response. I guess it takes their server a while to process a 9 MB file...

Adobe is far from innocent however. The security restrictions do include the following:
Printing: Not Allowed
Changing the Document: Not Allowed
Selecting Text and Graphics: Not Allowed

Also, there are REALLY ANNOYING advertisements every 10 pages.

There is no acknowledgement of Project Gutenberg that I can find, and I cannot select text to try to compare the texts. Maybe we could find an error or something in the Gutenberg text and check if it is in Adobe's version too. Project Gutenberg allows them to do this with their texts however, so they are within their rights to use it without acknowedgement.

And worst of all is this, when you get your "Web Buy" access key:

Adobe.com is requesting the following information about your computer. This will be used to tie the document you requested to your computing environment.

Computer ID
Storage device(s) IDs

Yes, they really do send your CPU and Hard Drive ids to register the eBook. And I cannot open the document on any other computer. I think the lifespan of paper is still much longer than the lifespan of cpus and hard drives.

The problem with latex on the web is that there already is a nice platform for those that wish to completely control page layout: Acrobat. And it has the advantage of playing nicely with mainstream word processors.

It all depends how you make your PDFs. The bulk of the size of a typical PDF is in the images, and the images may be embedded within the PDF in various formats and with various levels of compression. A comparison without detailing what format was used is meaningless.

For example, if you scan a typical one page black and white text document at 300dpi and save the result as a TIFF with CCITT Group 4 compression it will be 20-50kB. If you make a PDF by printing to Postscript then using the PDF generation tool within the GhostScript Viewer you will end up with a PDF that is several MB. That's because embedded within the PDF will be an uncompressed bitmap. If you make the PDF using the c42pdf utility your PDF will be the same size as the TIFF, 20-50kB. That's because embedded within the PDF will be the compressed bitmap.

If you use the Adobe Acrobat tools to produce your PDFs, you will find lots of options for controlling how embedded images are compressed, what the resolution is and what formats are used. You can select different options for B&W, greyscale and colour images.

I suspect the DjVu comparison is not comparing like with like. And in any case, as has been noted, anyone who generates PDFs of documents like annual reports with a scanner is missing the point.

Well, what LizardTech's site says is:

>Download a 50-page color catalog in DjVu format
>in the time it takes to download a single page
>of that same catalog in PDF format.

So it looks like when they say "faster", they mean "smaller" (and thus faster to download).

BTW, I so much hope that if this goes anywhere, the format will be made open. (Fat chance :( ) Someone made a comparison on the BetaNews story with the problems with GIF; but that's not comparing like with like; we have a new format which requires a plug-in. It's more like pdf, only worse, because the viewers won't be as easily available.

The gamut of RGB and CMYK intersect, but none of both is a strict subsect of the other, see
here (at bottom of the page).

They say:
"Both models [RGB and CYMK] fall short of reproducing all the colors we can see. Furthermore, they differ to such an extent that there are many RGB colors that cannot be produced using CMY(K), and similarly, there are some CMY colors that cannot be produced using RGB."

The classic photoshop rule of thumb was to have a image DPI 3x to 5x the LPI of the press.

Actually, that will just give your imagesetter a headache from the extraneous data you're downloading. 2xLPI is almost always an adequate resolution, and 2.2 is the absolute maximum you'll ever need. See http://www.adobe.com/support/tech doc s/c29e.htm or Ch. 3 of the Photoshop manual.

Danny

I'm sorry, but you're an idiot and you don't know what you're talking about

Just some of the sites using css.

1. Altavista - There is a big whomping style block right at the top of the source.
2. AskJeeves - There is a linked CSS document, plus a style block definition.
3. Adobe - Even has javascript to customize style sheets according to platform and browser.
4. AOL - 4 lines into the source and look! a style definition.
5. AT&T WorldNet - You have to wade through some javascript, but you'll see it.

That was just the A's. Please think before you spout such blatant misinformation as this.

Here are a few options to consider.

i) MathType. It's a souped up version of the free Equation editor. I haven't used it myself, but I've heard good things about it. Pros: You can still use Powerpoint. Cons: It costs money!

ii) Use LaTeX/LyX to create the slides (the seminar class works fairly well). Then convert the whole thing to pdf and display using the full screen feature of Acrobat Reader. If you're running LaTeX under Unix/Linux, remember to first generate the postscript with Type 1 fonts, or the pdf file will look awful on screen. Pros: Everything is free (except Acrobat distiller, and maybe you could use something like dvi2pdf or pdftex instead). Cons: You can't use snazzy Powerpoint effects, although acrobat will let you use some transitions effects between slides.

iii) Another untried solution: Mathematica. If you don't have Mathematica, you could try Publicon, which is essentially the Mathematica front-end being marketed separately as a technical publishing tool. Look here for some examples. This is another free solution.

Adobe has an online tool for converting pdf files to html. Just put in the pdfs' URLs, and hurry before they get slashdotted.

San Jose, Calif., (December 15, 1999) (Nasdaq:ADBE)--With the Linux operating system gaining momentum as a significant platform for helping companies build their Internet infrastructures, Adobe Systems today announced its initial support for Linux®. Beginning in the first quarter of 2000 Adobe expects to offer a Linux version of Adobe® Acrobat® Distiller® software. Starting today Adobe customers can download a beta version of Adobe FrameMaker® software for Linux from the Adobe.com Web site.

"Adobe monitors its markets closely to keep apprised of customer trends and requirements, and we've seen a growing interest among our customers in the adoption of the Linux operating system," said Bruce Chizen, Adobe's executive vice president of Worldwide Products and Marketing. "As we seize new opportunities to provide solutions that can be easily scaled to take advantage of the Web, we are encouraged that Linux seems to have potential as an alternative platform for our customers."

No applications from Adobe? How about FrameMaker?

-Waldo

One of the reasons that i decided to use Linux as my primary OS was when I started to research how much it would cost me to get some decent software. The corporate powers have really gotten out of hand in how much that they charge for software. Just ask anybody who wants to get a copy of MSOffice. (Go S tarOffice!) Also of concern is the price of fun software such as Adobe Photoshop, or animatek's worldbuilder.

What is the software industry trying to pull? Sure there are many people out there who have the money to buy this stuff, but how many times would sales (and therefore profits) increase if you could get cool stuff like that for only about US$100?

Try this:
http://partners.adobe.com /asn/developer/PDFS/TN/TIFF6.pdf

This is the TIFF specification (very useful) but as TIFF supports JPEG compression the scheme is well explained. GIF compression is explained too. It is 385k. If bandwidth is really an issue, e-mail me and I can send you a .zip (which is still 269kb)

This kind of web design is happening more and more, even on some big e-commerce sites. It's bad not only for Netscape users but for just about anybody who wants to or has to use some other kind of display device or browser: handhelds, wireless, people with disabilities.

In this case, Adobe GoLive is at fault, and its own home page is broken as well. Throw it out or at least complain to Adobe.

• WebDAV support
• SVG Support
• Very tight Photoshop integration (key!)

Unless I'm mistaken, they're referring to the use of tear-away tabbed toolbars. That's kind of a mouthful, but you can get the idea here.

If you look at the screenshot, you'll note a floating toolbox with a tab at the top which says "layers". The tab can be dragged onto other toolboxes to create customized versions, or torn off of toolboxes if you prefer to give it a space of its own.

I don't recall ever having seen one of these in an application besides those belonging to Adobe and Macromedia, although Painter (now owned by Corel, formerly by Metatools, and before that by Fractal Design) had something similar.

Still, it's obvious at this point that Adobe is pretty desperate. Photoshop still reigns supreme for high-end still image editing and pre-production, but Macromedia is kicking their tail all over the place on the web. To be fair, Adobe LiveMotion looks like a pretty nifty tool (I haven't tried it), but at this point Adobe knows that it's playing catch-up, and doesn't much like it.

I don't know where the name "tabbed widgets" came from. In the article and in Adobe's press release they talk about "tabbed palettes", which sounds very different. Clearly, they are not talking about those popular multi-page dialog boxes with tabs at the top. Still, I haven't been able to figure out what exactly this is as the web site which Adobe put up to discuss the issue is not responding at the moment... /.ed, perhaps? Anyway, if anyone knows what "tabbed palettes" are, please do tell.

------

http://www.adobe.com/svg - go there and find out how unavailable it is.

SVG specifications have been evolving for quite some time, and Adobe is one of the companies in the forefront of SVG acceptance. At Adobe's SVG website you can download the SVG plug-in (2.4meg, Win32/Mac) and then see demos of what SVG is capable of. One of the coolest things SVG can do over Flash is client-side image filters, such as marbled textures, flaming text, and embossing, without the user having to download a large raster image.

The biggest problem facing SVG going forward is the strong alliance between Microsoft and Macromedia, the makers of Flash. This alliance lead to the tight integration of Flash in Internet Explorer 5.5. Fortunately Adobe has worked out a deal with Microsoft to automatically download the SVG viewer on-demand in future releases, much like Internet Explorer automatically installs the Flash viewer now.

Personally I think the biggest strength of SVG lies in its text/xml format, because any current HTML generating tool (perl, php, cold fusion, asp) can generate SVG code just as easily.

SVG specifications have been evolving for quite some time, and Adobe is one of the companies in the forefront of SVG acceptance. At Adobe's SVG website you can download the SVG plug-in (2.4meg, Win32/Mac) and then see demos of what SVG is capable of. One of the coolest things SVG can do over Flash is client-side image filters, such as marbled textures, flaming text, and embossing, without the user having to download a large raster image.

The biggest problem facing SVG going forward is the strong alliance between Microsoft and Macromedia, the makers of Flash. This alliance lead to the tight integration of Flash in Internet Explorer 5.5. Fortunately Adobe has worked out a deal with Microsoft to automatically download the SVG viewer on-demand in future releases, much like Internet Explorer automatically installs the Flash viewer now.

Personally I think the biggest strength of SVG lies in its text/xml format, because any current HTML generating tool (perl, php, cold fusion, asp) can generate SVG code just as easily.

SVG specifications have been evolving for quite some time, and Adobe is one of the companies in the forefront of SVG acceptance. At Adobe's SVG website you can download the SVG plug-in (2.4meg, Win32/Mac) and then see demos of what SVG is capable of. One of the coolest things SVG can do over Flash is client-side image filters, such as marbled textures, flaming text, and embossing, without the user having to download a large raster image.

The biggest problem facing SVG going forward is the strong alliance between Microsoft and Macromedia, the makers of Flash. This alliance lead to the tight integration of Flash in Internet Explorer 5.5. Fortunately Adobe has worked out a deal with Microsoft to automatically download the SVG viewer on-demand in future releases, much like Internet Explorer automatically installs the Flash viewer now.

Personally I think the biggest strength of SVG lies in its text/xml format, because any current HTML generating tool (perl, php, cold fusion, asp) can generate SVG code just as easily.

SVG specifications have been evolving for quite some time, and Adobe is one of the companies in the forefront of SVG acceptance. At Adobe's SVG website you can download the SVG plug-in (2.4meg, Win32/Mac) and then see demos of what SVG is capable of. One of the coolest things SVG can do over Flash is client-side image filters, such as marbled textures, flaming text, and embossing, without the user having to download a large raster image.

The biggest problem facing SVG going forward is the strong alliance between Microsoft and Macromedia, the makers of Flash. This alliance lead to the tight integration of Flash in Internet Explorer 5.5. Fortunately Adobe has worked out a deal with Microsoft to automatically download the SVG viewer on-demand in future releases, much like Internet Explorer automatically installs the Flash viewer now.

Personally I think the biggest strength of SVG lies in its text/xml format, because any current HTML generating tool (perl, php, cold fusion, asp) can generate SVG code just as easily.

However, GnomeOffice has a better edge in the future if you include GIMP in it. StarOffice doesn't come with a photo editing tools, something like Photoshop. And that's a good news for GnomeOffice. Especially, GIMP is a very good software to use.

If they really want to make those software (AbiWord, Gnumeric, GIMP, ...) as a office suite, they should work on a central file type or file format that can let these "GnomeOffice" document types compatible and interactive with each other.

Unlikely that GnomeOffice will be use by most *NIX users. Not yet. But one may never know if once Gnome will take over the CDE world.

Good luck!

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

The PDF specification is available from Adobe in PDF or ASCII format.

The PDF specification is available from Adobe in PDF or ASCII format.

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

Anyone who pays $500 for PhotoPaint is getting rooked big-time. The suggested price for the full CorelDraw suite is $695, and I don't think anyone sells it at full retail. The CorelDRAW suite is worth spending money on, but PhotoPaint is not. For far less money one can buy Paint Shop Pro which takes care of almost everything PhotoPaint can do, and if you're looking for full Photoshop compatibility for your service bureau, Photoshop is only $114 more through Adobe and cheaper on the street.

Prices for many of these programs seem steep for home use, but the main market for these programs is professional users, who can write off the cost of the program as a business expense (saving 28% or more in the US), and who will use the program to make money. $700 is a lot of money, but if the program saves you 7 to 14 hours over time, it's paid for itself.

http://access.adobe.com/ is a tool ostensibly to assist the visually impaired get information from PDF files - but which can also be used to get all the text at once.

I believe a similar tool (or maybe just the unix command "strings") was used to parse through the George W. web bublished PDF of his financial backers.

Note: You need the full version of Acrobat; Acrobat Reader won't cut it.