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Before PDF: John Warnock's 'Camelot'
Karl De Abrew writes: "In the Spring of 1991 Dr. John Warnock wrote a paper he
dubbed "Camelot" in which the Adobe Systems Co-founder and
CEO laid out the foundation for what has become Acrobat/PDF.
With the author's permission, Planet PDF is pleased to publish
the full-text of that historic document." Of course, now it's 2002, and the dream of universal display / printing remains only partly realized; PDFs really have helped to narrow the gap between dream and reality, though.
In my opinion, it isn't truly good until it can be freely converted back and forth into other usable, edit-able formats.
Which, I note, thanks to the efforts of many, is a criteria that even Microsoft Word doc format is able to meet.
The main problem I see is that its designed to reproduce print-like quality, which is great for when you need a hard copy, but the trend to turn PDF into a lazy man's HTML is definately for the worse.
First, the filesize is ridiculous.
The interface needs a lot of work, unless I have a scrolling mouse I won't even bother reading one. The little hand widget must go. Also, I don't want to have to resize my screen to be able to read half the poorly produced PDFs out there. No use in jumping to the next page when I can only display 2/3 of the current one. So back to the little hand.
They're non-editable for the most part once you make them.
They are in a closed format and controlled by a litigious company unafraid to use the DMCA for their own questionable ends.
The plug-ins are notoriously buggy.
Its great for sending something straight to the laser printer, but as an on-line advance it really just stinks.
In my opinion, it isn't truly good until it can be freely converted back and forth into other usable, edit-able formats.
.doc.
First of all, it is editable, though not as easily as
Second of all, part of the appeal of PDF is precisely the fact that you can't edit them unless you have some specific tools to do this. Believe it or not, but a lot of businesses find a technology that allows them to share documents electronically without running the risk of someone tampering with them quite convenient. Why do you think it is fax machines are still used as widely as they are?
I happen to think that PDF's are really convenient, they even allow for fill in the blank forms that make it possible (in the Netherlands at least) to interact with all sorts of government agencies without having to go through the tedious process of calling them up, asking them to send a form to you (which they always fail to do unless you remind them at least three times over the course of three weeks), filling it out and sending it back (causing it to "get lost in the mail" (room, I suppose)). Now I just download the PDF, complete the form and mail it back. Done.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
You're right in the fact that it is ridiculous, but for the wrong reasons....
With HTML, the page contures and changes to match your environment. Width, Height, Font, Color, etc.
If a web page made up of PDFs is designed on a 1024x768 screen, anyone with a 640x480 screen is really screwed. Imagine Lynx trying to read PDFs!
PDFs are great for documents that WILL be printed on a standard and consisten sized media (letter-sized paper) but it's serious drawbacks are that it doesn't scale, resize, change fonts etc. Try printing an A4 PDF on letter-sized paper, or vice versa.
In fact, I've seen PDFs made quite badly. The problem is, the creator holds all the cards, and the user is screwed. With some PDFs, the designers use damn tiny fonts, and huge margins, making the printout look like suck.com. With HTML, we can override the font settings, we set the margins, and in general, the user simply controls exactly how they want it.
That's the difference. PDFs put the creator in too-much control, and HTML puts the end user's in total control.
Screw PDF, I like HTML.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
In a way, PDF is one of the most idiotic formats for document interchange ever designed. Who exactly thought it would be a good idea to hardcode the paper size?
At a minimum this means that all internationally distributed PDFs have to come in two variants, A4 and Letter. And you need a screen wide enough to view a whole line of text - no possibility of reformatting into narrower columns for palmtops etc.
There are plenty of good things about PDF, taken as a way to represent a printed page. But it certainly is not a good format to exchange documents that are meant to be readable by everyone.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Precisely. NeXT chose to license Adobe's PostScript RIP, rather than reimplement it from scratch using the publically available specs. That's doesn't make PostScript any less open. It's a business decision. Brother apparently chose to implement it themselves, which means they don't have to pay a license fee to Adobe (but in the process, they lose the right to use the PostScript trademark). A business decision once again.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I second that anti-PDF notion... PDF puts full control in the hands of the creators and practically no control in the hands of the users. HTML will look damn good at any resolution, in the font I choose, with or without images as I see fit, with the margins that I want it to have.
You're not getting it, the whole point of
The reason you have no control over the content of the
At the same time, the reason PostScript and i belive according to the artical the Camalot project was created it so that Font, Objects, Content and Formatting is expressed the SAME way regardless of generation, machine or platform, and so letting you change the formatting (margins and all) kinda defeats the prupose doesn't it?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
and the biggest advantage of PDF:
I'm sure there are other differences, but even many people I know simply use pdfLaTeX now to generate PDFs from LaTeX markup instead of the old DVIs, so presumably even they see an advantage in Adobe's format. When it comes down to it, I suspect that PDF's font embedding, better handling of other embedded content, and on top of that simply its pervasiveness are the biggest factors. Anyone is welcome to correct me on any of this, however.
I am amazed to see how much possitive things people have to say about PDF here at /. The popularity of PDF is one of the most broken things about the web. TBL was quite familar with PDF when he invented HTML -- it was the problems with PDF (and word processor formats) that motivated him!
PDF promotes archaic thinking. Information needs structure not paper-oriented formating! PDF also causes huge amounts of trouble for the blind and others with print handicaps. It is not a proper format for on-line viewing. Its proper place is only for lawyers and others who overly cherish the "original" hard copy document.
Complain about PDF wherever you encounter it when HTML would be better! HTML can be accessible, but most office suites do such a bad job with their HTML export that authors who have tried that think the PDF will be a better "linga franca". They are wrong.
NeXTStep realised that dream, as does Mac OS X. Apple is now the largest Unix OS vendor on the planet, so it's fair to say that the majority of Unix systems now realise this dream.
If we discount Windows users, on the basis that they are not qualified to make informed decisions about anything (or else they wouldn't be using Windows) it looks like that dream has been mainly realised, in fact.
Hooray!
This post is so silly I'm sure I am responding to a troll who is intentionally setting up a weak straw man for others to knock down. But the mindset you parody is so prevelant I can't overcome the temptation to be the one to knock it down.
...and all they can think about is the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR.
...or helping developing countries?
And what's wrong with that? Adobe is not a charity - and even if they were charities aren't very effective without the ALMIGHTY DOLLARS that the greedy people pursuing said dollars donate.
What about truth? What about freedom?!
They're nice and all, but you can't eat them. Also, they don't seem particularly relevent.
What about human rights...
Again seems irrelevant to a portable document format. I suppose now you can send a nicely formatted petition electronically. Is that what you are getting at?
You can't help them very much without the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR, as I said before truth and freedom (and petulant whining) are nice, but you can't eat them.
It's all well and good to be altruistically concerned with the welfare of everybody in the world but most people, including yourself, are far more concerned with the welfare of themselves and their families. Starvation in Somalia becomes only an academic concern when you yourself are starving. Altruism is a rich (or at least comfortable) mans game and you don't get rich (or even comfortable) unless you pursue the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR (at least a little) usually by being employed by someone who is pursuing the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR with great zeal.
Warnock like everybody else is primarily concerned about his own welfare, but to become wealthy he must be concerned about other peoples welfare. He must invent or sell something that will meet those other peoples needs sufficiently that they will spend their own money on his product. To produce and sell that product he must be concerned with the needs (money, health-care, vacations) of the people he will hire to help him sell his product to make himself rich. To get the money he needs to hire those employees he must concern himself with the needs of investors and fund their retirement so they won't starve when they are old. Finding himself a wealthy man. He is forced whether he wants to or not to give a large portion of his wealth to the maintenance of his government and to government charity to several hundred more people. Finally after inadvertently meeting the communications, employment, retirement and charitable needs of hundreds of thousands of people Warnock gives vastly greater sums than you or I to the poor and oppressed.