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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...
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.
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.
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).