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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. --
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
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.
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.
It has not been proposed because HTML is not a page description language. It's a document structuring language, even if a lot of people do not understand the difference. Its is simply the wrong tool. HTML displays a document using information about its structure (title, paragraphs), to an arbitrary media. A page description language is about describing precisely the graphical structure (x,y position of all elements).
Take a arbitrary page layout (say a magazine - a paper one), and ask yourself, can I describe this with HTML? The answer is no. HTML and PDF have different goals. Trying to use one for the other is not a good idea. Use the right tool.
A much better candidate would be the SVG format, which is based on XML, open and has all the needed features. It is a true vector graphic file format. The only problem is, it is not widely supported (and maybe the font embedding mechanism is not as good).
Then again, PDF does the job nicely -- and is widely supported. While you can embed proprietary features in PDF, so can you with an HTML file (simply by including a GIF file). In fact if you take the current HTML technology, as far as I know, the font embedding mechanism used for HTML is completly proprietary.
Maybe this issue is more complicated than Adobe = BAD Open Source = GOOD
As to why PDF has better compression that an compressed html page. The difference is that the compression is done inside the file, so each type of data is compressed with a different compression algorithm. Also PDF has a feature that is called object reuse, the basic idea is that if an element is present multiple time in a document, it will only be stored once (perfect compression if you want). If you design your html document carefully, you can get this, but more often, machine generated html is very redundant.
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
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?
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.