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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.
Even as a Windows user, I'll be the first to admit that even a standard word processor like Word leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to creating a document that'll display correctly everywhere (even across different versions of Word). Adobe has done some excellent work with the PDF format, it's just a shame that it's another company-controlled format, though at least much better than the Word .doc!
Is Linux for you and your business? Probably not.
Especially when you consider that OSX now has a graphics engine based on PDF, which begins to finally close the gap between screen and paper ...
Gotta love those dreamy nerds.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
John and I haven't kept in touch in recent years but I wish him the very best of luck with Adobe. He's a very talented man and he deserves success.
df
Another function of the IPS binder will be to include reconstituted fonts into the IPS file. The idea here is to include just the characters of a font that are actually used in the document. A result of including the necessary characters from the fonts used is that an IPS file will be completely self contained. In other words, when I send a file around the country, I don't have to worry about whether the receiving location has all the fonts required by the document. The current situation is that complex font substitution schemes are used to deal with locations not having the appropriate fonts.
Later on Adobe did better than this, with the Multiple Master Font idea --- even if a font or a subset of the font is not embedded (this can seriously bloat file sizes as the font encodings are a lot of overhead for a small document), Acrobat reader (or some other display device) can render the font pretty well because it knows how to "fake" the correct appearance based on similarities to combinations of master fonts. It's a very clever approach.
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
Everyone knows about OSX and DPDF. When will Windows abandon the bitmapped display it has used since, well, forever? Is MS working on a system similar to DPDF? Or do they not even really regard the technology as worthwhile? It seems odd to me, since MS's cash cow is Word and Excel, that they are essentially using the same graphics engine they have always used, albeit much faster and with more features. (opponents of MS will say that this applies to all their technologies). Is it merely that they (MS) have not built their own, and are hesitant to license PDF from Adobe? Or are there strong technical reasons (besides, I guess, breaking the old software).
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
..and it would seem to be a solid alternative to the office/printer problem on Linux. Color printing on Linux remains a problem for some printer models (although this is improving). Any office suite is limited in use without the ability to print *correctly* from Linux. The need for the Windows printer driver is very inconvenient.
However, once one learns LyX, it would seem, one can author documents at least (with color graphics, no less) on Linux in a format that can be exported to either PDF or HTML, and viewed or printed on any platform with a PDF viewer, including eBooks, Linux, Mac and Windows. This makes things far more convenient.
Note that the paper indicates they were originally planning on selling the viewers. I'll bet there is an internal political story there...
I assume they eventually got paid for including it in the printer drivers in Mac OS and Windows, but initially, they were just giving it away. In fact, they also gave away the rendering tools to just about everybody who owned another Adobe product. Of course the net result was that it quickly became indispensable.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Previously this was available only though special software which had to be purchased from Adobe. Now the operating system emables me to create documents with the assurance that it will be rendered on anyone's screen as it would have been rendered by my printer.
Beyond that, I know anyone can print their own hard copy of my document without any cross-platform problems. That's something MS Word cannot boast.
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.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
... or how printing is highly overrated and I'd rather use hyperlinks than (see page 41). I don't quite see how PDF is better than a regular markup language, a manual or technical paper isn't a work of art. Why does it need to look exactly the same. I'm looking for information, not a breathtaking setup of paragraphs. Why not do it in html?
And will someone please tell me what's up with those "This page intentionally left blank". Not only is it contradictive, but a waste of paper/time/etc.
I know most readers here (myself included) are from IT industry, let me also introduce some effects of PDF on prepress industry. (Let's look at things from another perspective)
In the old days, there was a lot of press approval and proofs being sent via the ad. agency to the end user for approval. With PDF, even the end user can fire up PDF reader on their own computer and view the electronic proofs, it is not color accurate (looking at the screen), but for most part (especially small cheap run), it works well.
The same PDF sometimes also get on the RIP (Rasterized Image Processor) for output, this assures same results from the electonic proofs. (accuracy is very important in this industry)
Major problem now is sometimes a prepress shop get one job done and sent to other for output to film or CTP (to plate), the PDF files does not have fonts embeded (PDF have this "feature"), then, it will become a hunt for the right fonts.
Prepress shops have mixed feelings for PDF, most that I talked to see it as a constructive technology.
>First, the filesize is ridiculous.
.DOC, you'd see more of a slant towards editing them.
Yes, but personally, I see it as a trend; Moore's Law, HD technology, and better broadband will make this trivial.
>The interface needs a lot of work
Eh, its just an implementation detail, isn't it?
>They're non-editable for the most part once you make them.
Only because Adobe wants to charge a lot for Acrobat. Were PDF as common as
>They are in a closed format
Isn't the actual format open? For instance, xPDF isn't a hack, it uses the open specs, right?
>controlled by a litigious company unafraid to use the DMCA for their own questionable ends.
Yeah, no argument there.
>The plug-ins are notoriously buggy.
Another implementation detail. Fix the plugins. I am not aware of something specific to PDF that causes that.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I think one of the major resistance that PDF have today is support from major Word Processor. MS Office and most major suite does not support saving as PDF "yet".
By the way, the most easiest way to covert MS Word doc to PDF without Acrobat would be Adobe's website, they offer 5 free online file conversion (supporting many source formats). Might be useful for some of you.
... but i feel for publishing purposes, i have yet to see anything with the ease of use of Acrobat. Espcially in publishing, where you have to mail upteen versions of magazine pages etc to clients who arn't technically oriented but whose go ahead for a run is needed.
.PUB or Pagemaker and PDF?
Besides, even with pros, acrobat gives WYSIWYG, embeded fonts, compression for text and images and so on.... i think the size overhead for all this is worth every bit it takes up...
And even if you don't agree, which is more moronic, sending in MS Publisher
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I'm surprised no-one (that I'm aware of) has proposed a 'bundled' portable HTML file format that would be non-proprietry, vendor neutral, and immune to problems like the Skylarov case.
/PAGE > sections, as well as < MEDIA > < /MEDIA> wrappers around text-encoded graphics file. Fonts could possibly also be shipped within the document.
All it would take (IMHO) is an extended HTML document which contained each individual HTML page in < PAGE > <
All the browser would have to be extended to do would be split up the pages, and decode the image information. Or, a simple parser could chop it into its component pages and images. Voila, a single-file multi-part document viewable by any browser.
Why is this better than a zipped set of HTML pages? For one it misses the unzipping and saving stage, making it as immediate as PDF. Secondly, the PHTML generator would do link checking and remunging ensuring local links within the document was completely self contained.
Any thoughts?
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
There is actually a free DPS library for X. It's made by Aladdin, the people who brought you Ghostscript, and the package itself is called Display Ghostscript.
It's actually not complete, and I don't know what's going on with it currently. I had seriously toyed with the idea of writing a window manager based off the library, a la' OSX, but from what I gathered the lib wasn't quite in a useable state. You can get it on debian via "apt-get install libdps" and there are dev packages too.
I would seriously love to see someone (particularly the Windowmaker & GNUStep team, as it fits them best) create my project of the DPS window manager and Widget set. I don't know how useful it would be, but I think it would definitely compel people to move forward. The URL for DPS programming info is here, if anyone is interested.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I dunno - the complete 423 page manual for Macromedia's Fireworks (with tons of embedded graphics) is about 6.5 megs and the print quality is light years ahead of the same document reproduced in HTML. That doesn't seem outrageous to me.
They're non-editable for the most part once you make them.
I think you're truly asking for magic software that can take input from any existing application, make it universally readable while retaining the formatting and also allow you to make changes to the complex formatting within the document.
PDF is revolutionary because it enables organizations to easily take documents intended for print and quickly/cheaply make them freely available electronically for a multitude of users. Think of all of the forms, manuals, etc. that are now available because they could just run it through Acrobat.
P.S.:And this has a score of 4? :-(
I'm no Adobe fan, but I've been working on PDF format for a few years and I found it great.
o cs/PDFRef.pdf
First, the filesize is ridiculous.
If you're comparing to plain text, yes. Otherwise, PDF have a built-in format that allows the producer to compress the PDF's streams (ie text and images) with a LZW algorithm.
They are in a closed format
These are java libraries for creating and editing PDFs :
pj[Open Source, GPL]
Big Faceless[Commercial w/ Evaluation]
retepPDF[Open Source, LGPL]
Java Pdf Library[Open Source, LGPL]
PDFGo[commercial]
rugPDF0.20[Open Source, LGPL]
By the way the closed format has an open specification : http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/d
Hey, why the fuck is this moderated as 'Troll'? Have people forgotten the Sklyarov so quickly?
Are Adobe employees now moderators on Slashdot?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Ummmmm, I'm not quite sure how to phrase this;
is there a non-pdf version available?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That was not PDF, that was their 'eBook' format. Very different indeed.
/. (although not often enough)
Ignorance is often modded down on
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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
The computer industry already had a standard format for controlling the layout, fonts, and appearance of printed text. Tex. I'm not real familiar with it, but I know it existed in the 70's, is still around as LaTex, and I think it's not proprietary. So can anyone clarify whether PDF has advantages over LaTex for anyone besides Adobe?
"Camelot"... laid out the foundation for what has become Acrobat/PDF.
I dont see what the hubbub is.. its only a model.
no
I like to think of PDF as an output format only. By using a flexible markup system like Docbook, you can export to a number of formats. PDF is excellent (and often required) by book printers. It provides an unambiguous picture of how a book should be laid out.
To me, PDF is a lot like a system executable. You write the document in some portable source code, then compile it for a particular need. Of course, this is a very different philosophy than WYSIWYG edits. Oh well.
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!
That's a terrible idea.
The basic problem with executable documents is that about all you can do is execute them. Editing them is tough. Conversion to another format is tough (PDF->HTML translation often sucks.) Search engines have trouble indexing executable documents reliably.
Compare HTML, which is declarative, not executable. It's much easier to do things with an HTML document than a PostScript, PDF, or TeX document. You can reformat for a different screen size, you can view it in a text browser, and you can even listen to it in an audio browser.
What PDF and PostScript tend to actually look like is a big block of canned code at the the beginning that converts whatever the generating program likes to generate, followed by the actual content in some nonstandard format. That's a pain to deal with.
Microsoft's .DOC format, while deliberately obscure and inconsistent, is a declarative format which can do most of the things PDF can. But you can also re-edit a .DOC document, which doesn't work on PDF or PostScript.
Now that we have enough experience with machine-readable documents to know what we need and don't need in the format, we don't have to use executable formats. PDF as a distribution format should go, and PostScript's role should be limited to printing.
Rich Text Format, folks.
It's not suffectient for EVERY document, but nearly every word processor on the planet can read (and write) them, and you'd be surprised what can be captured in an RTF file.
The OmniWeb browser uses them for web archives (or did at one time), and I couldn't beleive how beautifully it kept the page appearance the first time I saw it.
I wonder that more people don't standardize on it.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
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.
PS != PDF!
PS != eBook!
My valid point was that PDF and its eBook derivative format is NOT open or free, if Dmitry is "violating" IP rights.
Furthermore, I never said everything Adobe does is wrong. Stop stuffing words into my mouth.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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.
PDF should not be used as a replacement for HTML. Just as people should be shot for making flash only sites, they should be shot for just slapping a bunch of images or PDFs up, and calling it a 'website'. PDF has its uses, and the problem is that there are still a fair number of folks using the technology incorrectly. Likewise, there are folks who still try to send HTML e-mails to me. You'll do better if you attempt to educate folks about the technology than just blowing it off.
First, the filesize is ridiculous.
Yes and no. When handled correctly, it's quite reasonable. The problems are when someone scans in a 50 page document, and saves it all as images, with no compression, and you're looking at 65-70k per page. When you start comparing similar, correctly formatted items (not too many folks have graphics laden 300 page manuals in MS word hanging around), but when you compare it to a similar EPS file, or even something pre-press, like Quark or PageMaker, it's about right. For those folks who need to have the memo or whatever saved electronically exactly as it came in, well, there's options for
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.
This is an application issue, and not a document standards issue. Personally, I use the pageup/pagedown keys normally.
They're non-editable for the most part once you make them.
Yet another pre-conceived falsehood. The problem is that you have Acrobat Reader, which only reads PDF files. There's a similar companion program for MS Word for those who want to read MS Word files, but don't want to shell out to be able to write them.
However, in this case, last year, when my roommate was entering the Games Workshop WH40k Grand Tournament, they had put up the application as a PDF. Unfortunately, wanted you to print it out, and write in the fields. I don't like that concept, so I opened it up in a full copy of Acrobat, and make it a little more functional. (added some fields, some automatic calculations, etc.)
They are in a closed format and controlled by a litigious company unafraid to use the DMCA for their own questionable ends.
*yawn*. You're starting to pull at straws, man. You could make that argument about just about any company who had a software product that they're not giving away for free. If you want to talk about some real hard asses, look up Kodak's Picture CD format.
The plug-ins are notoriously buggy.
Once again, straws. I'm guessing my definition of 'notorious' and yours differ greatly. It's rock-solid on a Mac. You might just want to move to a more stable OS.
Its great for sending something straight to the laser printer, but as an on-line advance it really just stinks.
Once again. You have to look at folks who use it correctly. There are times when PDF is the better format. Any sort of application or form that needs to be printed and signed can be filled on online, then printed, signed, and sent in. You get your pretty-printed version, and you reduce text-entry and the possibility for user error on the backend. [You just queue it up, and have someone verify they didn't change anything when you get the signed copy].
Personally, I feel that Flash and HTML3 were crappy advancements, due to the amount that people misuse them. The same with JavaScript and CSS. There are right times, and wrong times for just about any technology. There will never be one product which will solve every problem that folks might have, and to think that it might ever happen is just plain ignorant. PDF fills certain niche markets better than HTML ever will. Likewise, HTML better fills other niches. Just because you don't have the same uses that other folks have doesn't mean the product 'just stinks'.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
...to publish it as a pdf document instead of HTML?
At that point, you are either wasting space, or distorting the Fonts/Images to fit the page. In other words, there's no reason to use PDF anymore if you aren't getting the exact same result as the source.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
WTF? All I said is I don't like the PDF format, I find it awkward to use! Will the moderator please GO FUCK HIMSELF, how's that for flamebait? Bring it on!