Open Source Complement to PDF?

nodvin asks: "Is there an Open Source alternative to PDF files? In the late 80's and early 90's I was building and distributing documents in a competing format called DigitaPaper by a company called Common Ground. DigitalPaper was a nice format and more cost effective than Adobe Acrobat. Common Ground seems to have lost out to Adobe (marketing muscle can be more important than the capabilities or qualities of competing products) and the company, or at least the product and format, seems to have been acquired by Hummingbird. Hummingbird is no longer providing any support for the product but is still providing the DigitalPaper viewer and there is a free Common Ground Internet Edition. Perhaps Hummingbird could be convinced to Open Source the code to Common Ground as well as the format of DigitalPaper?"

Comments

Re:What do you need it for ?

[ader]

> So the question is, why do you want PDF ?

1. Because it has built-in compression and is searchable, unlike PostScript.
   
2. Because, believe it or not, some people still don't have PostScript printers (or GhostScript) - maybe PCL if you're lucky.
   
3. Because readers are freely available for most platforms (although font display in Xpdf is necessarily limited), especially as Adobe have been smart enough to release the specs.
   
4. Because it's a decent enough hybrid of online and hard copy document formats (if you believe such a monster should exist at all - yes, I agree HTML and PostScript may be better in their respective roles, but sometimes you don't want the hassle of supplying multiple formats).
   
5. Because it's acceptable to Windows users, and helps steer them away from using Word as a distribution format.
   

Ade_
/

truly portable PDF?

[unitron]

The local community college has a much better internet connection than I have and better, faster, quieter printers than I have, but they don't have Acrobat installed on their machines (Win95), and they take a very dim view of anyone else installing anything on their machines. Is there anything (like a .exe or .com) that would fit on a floppy that would let me open and print a PDF file and then leave the machine the way I found it? I can't seem to express the question succinctly enough for search engines to find anything except a bunch of links to Adobe.

Re:Try Ghostscript

[Jess]

Is the implementation of compression in Ghostscript a recent enhancement? In my experience GS's pdf files are much larger than Acrobats for large images. Perhaps I should try GS again...

Re:Try Ghostscript

[Jess]

Excellent advice. I upgraded from 5.10 to 6.01 and found the compression to be much improved!

open-source PDF tools exist

[woggo]

SGML-TOOLS will produce PDF output, as will PDFTeX and friends (PDFLaTeX, etc.) There are many open-source PDF readers and writers (xpdf, ghostview are example readers); you can even configure PHP with PDF output support. (Doing a fm search for PDF turns up a *lot* of hits, too.) It's probably a lot easier to capitalize on existing, widely adopted, open technology than to try and convince a company to open a closed, dormant technology and then to convince everyone to adopt it.

~wog

Re:open-source PDF tools exist

[PigleT]

I have one problem with this approach: it makes the open-source world appear subservient to the capitalist-pig world, yeah?
The spec for PDF is "available" *IF* you already grok PDF itself - IOW if I were sitting here on a plan9 box, I would not be able to read the spec in order to write an open-source reader / editor / printer of PDF files. That feels "unclean", to start with.
If the open-source world is lagging behind due to attempting to follow non-open (see the GFDL, for example) specs, there's a problem.
~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

Re:Try Ghostscript

[Matts]

Remember that most linux distros ship with older ghostscripts. So the answer is yes. Use GS6.

PDF Specs are Available

[matthewg]

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

Try Ghostscript

[Anonymous Coward]

Ghostscript is an open-source implementation of PostScript and PDF. I use it rather than Acrobat for producing PDFs. (I still use Acrobat Reader for viewing them, though, simply because I prefer its interface over Ghostscript's viewer, Ghostview.) You can find it at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost.

Re:Try Ghostscript

[Matts]

I do wish pillars of the community would read the documentation before making posts like this ;-)

Ghostscript's ps2pdf output format uses Flate compression where requests for LZW compression are made. This is in the documentation, and is that way because of the patent problems.

GS's ps2pdf generally produces pdf files around the same size as (or only slightly larger than) Acrobat's Distiller.

Re:Try Ghostscript

[Bruce Perens]

It's nice that Ghostscript can both write and render PDF. It's too bad that PDF compression uses LZW and Ghostscript avoids compressing PDFs because of the Welch (Unisys) patent. So, your PDFs come out a lot bigger than with Acrobat. Alas.

Bruce