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PDF Alternatives?
An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those of us trying to get rid of Adobe products on our sites, what is the best alternative to PDF? It needs to be something a typical user can easily get a plugin for." There are a couple of obvious choices when it comes to viewing PDF files, like Xpdf -- and several others pointed out on the Boycott Adobe site -- but does anyone have suggestions on the best way to create nicely portable documents? And if someone wants to stick with PDF (but not Adobe), what PDF-creating applications, especially Open Source ones, have people had either successes (to emulate) or failures (to avoid)?
While GIFs are bad because they use software patented technology, no such thing exists in PDF. I would love to bash Adobe, but PDF is really a good, open standard (like almost any technology that came out of Adobe). We should try to have complete, free implementations of the PDF format (I believe there is no free support for JavaScript in PDF files now, for example, but the use of it is questionable), so that nobody would have to buy the Adobe products. I believe the same approach of what Apple is doing with OS X, except I believe they payed Adobe to use the technology, instead of writting their own implementation. I don't understend why Microsoft didn't include PDF support in windows yet, putting Adobe out of business (well, they are partners in stuff like OpenType, perhaps that is why).
The problem with PDF (and I understand this is a problem just with the ebook format, defined in the latest PDF specification) is not a technology problem (you can implement it freely technologically speaking, you can't do that with GIFs), no patents. The problem is this buggy DMCA. If you are implementing the specification, you may choose to do whatever you want with it, but the DMCA will go after you if make a program that will "break" the security (the DMCA should give provision to interoperability, but they will most likely see you as a criminal, not a hacker (good sense)).
To stop using PDF would really be a step back. PDF is not only a compressed ps, it is a format that tries to overcome problems in the PS language (if you consider that PS and PDF are computer languages it is much harder to make a buggy PDF program then PS, hence, almost all PDF files will open, while PS files from some programs sometimes will *never* print. In PDF, everything in the file is stored as objects in a very "well behaved" way. In PS, you need to use the DSC (document structure conventions), which are special comments on the code with special meaning (comments should not have meaning. It is a hack.) Many programs don't behave well with this DSC comments.
And why use PS? Remember that PS is also a product from Adobe, with the same terms as PDF.
Or so they say...
These are only formatting languages. DVI would have been a more appropriate suggestion, but even that has limitations compared to PDF (i.e., linking, bookmarks, notes, etc). For nice looking "print quality" output which both prints and views well, it is hard to beat PDF at the present time.
(A little off-topic: IMHO, Docbook is a better choice for this sort of thing -- TeX/LaTeX are nice, but they are showing their age. I have written a thesis and many articles in LaTeX, and have found Docbook to be far superior even if a bit immature).
The real silver bullet to good programs is caffeine; lots and lots of caffeine! *twitch, twitch*
But rather alternatives to PDF. How about good, old-fashioned HTML+images? Or another idea is one of the more liberal eBook formats I suppose. The main point of this post is to point out the poster doesn't seem to want to have any pdfs, not just use an alternative method of writing them :P
The question was whether there are alternatives to PDF for which there are readily available viewers.
The answer is no.
In the mid-'90s, there were a couple of competing technologies, each with its own proprietary viewer. Among the worst was Corel's Barista, which used JVM 1.0 applets for a viewer. It was a nice idea that the early capabilities of Java made unworkable.
Among the best was Common Ground, which was a lot like Acrobat with the added advantage of having a very lightweight viewer. For people without the plugin or standalone viewer, you could distribute Mac and Windows executables of the document with a self-contained viewer that was in the ballpark og 40K in size. By 2.0, they also had a viewer applet in Java. However, the quality of the documents produced wasn't as good as Acrobat's. It worked well for word processor documents and spreadsheets, but wasn't good for line art and desktop-publishing output. Hummingbird acquired them and tried to turn it into a universal viewer technology for its document management system. After a while, unable to catch up with Adobe in terms of document quality, they discontinued it.
Net-it Now was another such tool. Again, it wasn't as good as Acrobat. Its niche was the use of Java (and later, ActiveX) viewers. Since Adobe eventually got Acrobat Reader distribution almost universal, the product didn't really have a compelling niche and it too was discontinued. I think parts of it live on in some Lotus/IBM products like SmartSuite.
Postscript files (compressed or not) are not a viable substitute unless you're only distributing your content to Slashdot readers and Unix sysadmins. Whereas some 95% of desktop users have a PDF viewer (usually Adobe's), fewer than 5% of people have a Postscript viewer, and many of those would have trouble making it work with a downloaded file.
Getting rid of your PDFs is a nice political statement, but shitty business practice. PDFs--especially properly hyperlinked ones--are the only decent way to distribute print materials like brochures and manuals reliably to end users. Make people download Ghostscript (with its awful installers), the Ghostscript core font set (with its manual installation process) and GSView? You try telling someone who is paying you thousands of dollars for your products or services to do that. I won't.
If you want to make a point, go ahead and add some (polite, professional) text to your pages with PDF download links noting that PDF is a convenient format regrettably put out by a company opposed to freedom of speech that also produces insecure products unfit for use with sensitive information. Offer a polite link to, say, the EFF's website for more information.
For your own part, maybe you can make a point of making any new PDFs without Adobe's tools. Say, ps2pdf if you don't need hyperlinking or color profile support. Or libpdf-based tools and libraries (from Perl, PHP, C, whatever) for PDFs you generate on the fly from raw content.
But don't get shrill and don't make it hard for your users and potential customers to get what they need in an easy and timely way. That just makes you look like an amateur and an idiot.
Indeed, this is actually a very good question, and one which I have thought about for years. The "here's why" boils down to two main reasons:
1) HTML has no concept of physical page representation, including most importantly, page breaks. This breaks HTML as a reasonable alternative for documents that you want to print out, or simply view as they would be printed.
2) More importantly, there is no reasonable and accepted way to bundle up all the components of an HTML page and distrubute them as a single lump. This is a non-trivial problem, since many modern single web pages consist of dozens or even hundreds of component parts (scripts, graphics, HTML code, style sheets, etc.)
There appears to be no good way to fix problem #1 without making changes to HTML, or at least propagating enough clients that add the functionality to see this sort of thing take off. Given that HTML looks frozen in time and all new stuff will be XML, with its notoriously too-flexible self description, I'm not holding my breath on this one.
Still, HTML could be much more useful as an information dissemination format if it were simply possible to address problem #2. There's some good news here: It's been *possible* to do this for years.
The obvious way to deal with bundling up an arbitrary bunch of webpages would be to use the capabilities of MIME, which was invented just for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I've only ever found one mail/browser combo that was capable of making this work: The Novita Mail client from the now-defunct company of the same name, which was based on Sun's old HotJava web browser. (Which was both its strength and its weakness - Sun really hurt a lot of early Java adopters by urging them to use HotJava as the base for their applications, and then abondoning the platform and not upgrading it. That's too bad, because the idea was good, even if the implementation was not. Netscape was supposed to pick up the Hot Java ball with thier Javagator, but they still haven't even managed a usable next gen conventional browser let alone a good Java-based browser...)
In any case, everything that's needed is there, with one tiny exception: relative URLs need to be able to include pointers to specific MIME body parts in an MHTML construct in some reasonably standard and predictable way. Note that this works in Netscape and IE for things such as images, but that there appears to be no way to point to a "sub-page" of HTML code. You can easily verify this for yourself with Netscape or another mail client/web browser: It's pretty easy to create MIME messages by hand that contain all the correct parts, but so far as I know, Novita is the only browser ever to *properly* handle true multipart MHTML attachments - it was even capable of drag-and-drop insertion of live java applets into a message. (Note that both Netscape and IE claim MHTML support, but niether can perform this basic function - unless a recent IE has fixed this...)
In the case of an image embedded in an MHTML message, the relevant URL looks like this:
This works fine for images, but does not work for pointing to another page of HTML, even if you carefully construct the MHTML by hand in all the ways that would seem to make sense.
So I suppose the second problem spawns two questions:
1) Does anyone know how to do this?
2) Does anyone know of a mail/browser combo that already knows how to do this?
If the answer to both of the above is "no", then I think we should start looking to get this functionality into open source mailtools, ASAP, as it would dramatically increase the utility of these tools by allowing entire web site "trees" to be easily e-mailed, in some cases replacing PDFs and the like with something even better. Comments?
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Maybe I'm not browsing at a low enough level here but most posters seem to be ignoring the fact that PDF does scalable pictures as well as typeset text. LaTeX's embedded picture mode is not all that good... however SVG is an open standard which does at least that part of it. Though of course, its not the whole solution.
In the main I agree with one of the other posters who suggested XSL-FO. If we had a 'native' XSL-FO viewer, and a document 'format' consisting of a (tar.gz) archive of xml body text, xsl styling, plus embedded objects, then we'd have something very close to a winner. However if you wanted to abandon PS and TrueType you'd have to embed all your fonts as SVG too... urk...
-Baz
But there's no reason to replace the PDF format (which is *NOT* just PostScript compressed). Adobe has clearly documented it and there are third party tools available to replace Acrobat Writer, such as ps2pdf.
ps2pdf ships with most Linux distributions as part of Ghostscript I believe. Just print to a file and then convert it.
On the windows end, you might want to check out FreePDF. It gives you instructions on how to mix the previously mentioned ghostscript, as well as a few other tools, to give you the ability to print to pdf format from any windows application.
Stupid question, what are the differences between the ps and pdf file formats?
PDF is basically an extension of PostScript. It has some additional features, such as the ability to include internal and external hyperlinks in a document and support for compression of the document file. Apparently, the program control constructs in PDF are more limited than those in PS.
The fact that gv can read both makes me think that they are infact very similar.
Indeed.
Also, if they are similar, why doesn't adobe add ps support to it's acrobat reader?
Beats me.
Why would you harrass and annoy your customers with this nonsense.
The problem here isn't Adobe, it's the LAW. Maybe you should be writing letters to the Congress or raising awareness of the issue outside of the Slashbot crowd.
There is no alternative to PDF out there. PDF is a great technology that has made my job alot easier.
This boycott is a childish waste of time and energy. The fact that no big-name supporters outside of the Open Source or computer worlds have joined make it nothing more than a joke.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The Gallery of Adobe Remedies lists a number of alternatives to Adobe products for dealing with PDF's. For other Adobe applications, see the Boycott Adobe page. It links to replacements for applications like Photoshop and Illustrator.
There are LaTeX processors for most platforms. A quick Google search can be rather useful.
As for viewing LaTeX files, you can convert them to many popular formats - HTML, postscript, PDF, RTF, DOC... - or use a browser plugin. IBM's TechExplorer (http://www.software.ibm.com/network/techexplorer/ ) allows you to view TeX, LaTeX and MathML documents in IE or Netscape.
LaTeX is much more flexible than any other format I've tried so far. It can do books, articles, reports, and slides - and these are all standard packages. The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is to LaTeX as CPAN is to Perl - an immensely useful repository of cool stuff. =)
It's not too hard to learn, either. You can pick up the Not-So Short Guide to LaTeX (http://wso.williams.edu/how/lshort2e) or any of the other tutorials on the Net.
LaTeX is beautiful. I haven't had to use anything else for my papers ever since I discovered the joys of LaTeX. <g>
How come no one has mentioned LaTeX? It's free, expandable, ported to _many_ platforms, and the list goes on and on.
:)
The down-side of LaTeX is that it is not a WYSIWYG editor, but the Linux / Unix community should not mind that part of it too much
Check out http://www.latex-project.org for more details. I highly recommend the MikTeX win32 implementation (http://www.miktex.org).
This allows you to create very nice pdf documents using star office 5.2 and print directly to pdf. This solution can be used cross platform. For the creation of pdf's without having to train people to use the CLI.
The drawback here is that star office is not truly open source and I have not tried this with open office.