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Before PDF: John Warnock's 'Camelot'

Posted by timothy on from the quest-for-the-holy-grail dept.

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.

4 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I couldn't live without it today by dzym · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Its nice for what it does, but hardly a revolution by gad_zuki! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Hardcoded paper size by Ed+Avis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  4. Re:LaTex? by BlueGecko · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Well, you'd want to be comparing PDF to DVI, or the Device-Independent Imaging format, not [La]TeX to PDF. LaTeX simply is a way to mark up the structure of a document and then process that and turn it into a well-formatted, ready-for-print version. DVI is the output files you get after running LaTeX on a source file, and, like PDF, they are platform-independent files that can be viewed at any resolution and used to be used in conjunction with PostScript for printing. My understanding of PDFs vs. DVI is as follows:
    • Both support essentially unlimited resolution (DVI's default measuring unit is the wavelength of light, while PDF uses a point but allows you to go to something like one one-millionth of that)
    • Both support hyperlinks
    • PDF allows you to embed fonts and images easily, while DVI relies on a PostScript renderer to be available for these features
    • PDF allows you to have a table of contents pane for quick navigation, while DVI does not (or, if it does, I've never seen a viewer implement this functionality)
    • I believe both allow you to theoretically embed content in other formats (indeed, as I just said, this is how DVI handles EPS images), but this is much more fully fleshed-out in PDF where one can easily embed movies and audio clips
    • PDF allows forms and "secure content," while DVI does not (and if you followed the Skylarov deal, you know PDF really doesn't either.)

    • and the biggest advantage of PDF:

    • It's far, far more widely available.


    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.