Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft takes on PDF
bhhenry writes "Linux Format reports on a new Microsoft PDF-killer technology to be included in Office 11, called XDocs. From the article: "Adobe's stock took an immediate hit, and some analysts went so far as to compare Adobe to erstwhile MS competitor Netscape.""
People are really paranoid.
Let me guess, IE7 will include built in support for them.
OpenOffice/StarOffice produce very nice pdf-files, wonder if that has anything to do with it.
But this time tey may not be so lucky. Now that the government has deemed it to be a monopoly, Micro$oft will be more than ever open to various suits and legal action. Adobe may even end up being victorious.
PDF is a documented, established format which does the job, has open implementations and is not from Microsoft, the company which even businesses begin to hate due to all the licensing crap as of late.
Surely this sort of thing is exactly what the US DOJ is avidly against - using overwhelming market share (in, say, office products) to gain overwhelming market share in other sectors (wysiwyg "electronic paper"). Hopefully the EU anti-competition measures will be more stringent than those in the US.
XDocs are based around the XML specification. Hence, wouldn't they be easily modifiable?
They are doing that because the new M$ office will be XML based and a form of and/or substiture for PDF will be needed, and since micro$oft doesent wanna pay for PDF licensing, you know where this is heading...
But I see that this, unlike browsers a few years back, as being pretty damn entrenched in the business and graphics world.
With browsers 6 years ago there was very little loyalty, so MSIE could move in before everyone realized just how powerful MS was going to be over Netscape and the other companies involved in browsers.
But with Adobe Acrobat we're talking about a refined and popular format. Actually, Acrobat is one of the best file ideas out there, IMHO. It is perfectly cross platform, well designed, and (neglecting to note the whole russian programmer fiasco) Adobe has a good business model behind it.
MS's only strong point could be integration, like they offer with all of their other 'solutions', but Adobe already has great integration wih their own suite of programs and even with Microsoft Word.
They should call it Bob...
as if microsoft has as much experience with the dtp market as adobe. shees, ms is desparate to get into new market.
You complain about a slow, bloated application and then say you're using Office? Even OpenOffice.org was faster for me when I used Windows. If you want to cut out the bloat, consider switching to Linux. Xpdf loads in milliseconds on my Gentoo box.
XDocs is an XML editor. It really has very little to do with output formats like PDF. The only company likely to be sweating about this product is Altova.
bp
As of this post their is something like 8 other posts and the article is already /.ed. makes one wonder if the server/link could not take it or if this story just really got everyone interested this early in the morning (US).
At any rate did anyone grab a mirror first?
man
No manual entry for
the first thing Bill Gates did when he got on the internet was to surf around looking to see whether the document files were in Microsoft formats. He wasn't happy with the number of PDFs he found.
No doubt they want to completely kill off PDF (but delayed atempting because of the trial): an important standardised format which can be read on any OS doesn't suit Microsoft. They will want to replace it with something which can be read on Windows & Macintosh and nothing else.
It's time that there is a free PDF clone out there. Lets start work.
...surely the issue is not whether or not it's Microsoft, but whether or not the technology actually works.
IMHO, postscript/PDF is one of the most ingenious formats around. It is extremely portable, handles fonts, vector graphics and (perhaps to a lesser extent) bitmaps wonderfully, and, if used sensible, can be extremely compact. And just about every typsetting machine on the planet uses it.
So for Microsoft to win this one, they are going to need to produce a pretty innovative product, for which the precedents are not good...
Virtually serving coffee
aaahhhhh. A non-anti-MS post. RATE IT DOWN IMMEDIATELY!
assholes. keep buryin your head in the sand, it'll make the bad people go away.
I hope that Adobe does not have the fate of Netscape ..
Here Turn off images in your browser, or else you'll end up waiting for the (slashdotted) server to cough up the images for the (cached) page.
Great. Just what is needed. Another proprietary file format.
:-)
/.'ed)
And I though Microsoft was going to embrace and exte^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H XML
Looks like file-format-joy for several more years for the Word users.
(And I haven't read the article. It's
He, who dies with the most toys, wins
It might be that Microsoft manages to twist XML to be only "Microsoft"-readable which is definately not human-readable or even easily parseable. They've managed to do similar things for HTML, Java and 3D already. :)
When designers trust a Microsoft product to get their high-end print jobs to the printer.
I would have really liked this, oh, say, 2 years ago. KDE even sets up a "print to pdf" feature that works quite well. I hear {open,star}office can handle them, and I hear OSX has native support for them. This leaves MS, yet again, far behind the times.
For instance:
-Transparency
-Full compression via JPEG, ZIP, LZW, GIF, PNG, etc
-Font sampling, ie: reduced character sets
-Full interactivity, media support (audio, video, forms)
-Seamless support by industry standard vector editors... think Illustrator, Freehand
Look at OS X... the whole damn GUI is rendered via PDF then spit out as an OpenGL texture... will XDocs compete with that level of sophistication?
Interesting but I doubt it will be a "PDF Killer".
Maybe it will be an alternate digital media format (most likely with some insane DRM/Palladium tie in).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
After reading about xdocs last week, we came to the following conclusion that XForm is in no way a end-user 'static' document format.
.net WinForms embeded in an office doc, talking to a database via a webservice.
What it does is 'just' provide an link between a document and databases through
What does that mean?
Well, now the office suite will be able to do the same thing as XUL+Soap in moz, in a much nicer way for the end user [remember, word _IS_ the computer for most persons].
I think that's a sweet move, as long as the webservices talking to XForms are not crippled and accessible from Moz, everyone will be happy... and as long as it's not yet another vb-only scripting language :
MS Xdocs
MS eXchange
MS Xbox
MS Windows XP
What next?
MS Xwindow?
MS Xnotfree86?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
<SARCASM>
Good thing the DOJ was so fair to Microsoft, I mean, look the excellent competition they are to the marketplace. Evil Adobe *has* after all a monopoly in PDF! Go Microsoft Go!
</SARCASM>
... and Microsoft makes a clone of it!
"With Microsoft, you get Windows. With Linux, you get the full house" - unknown
You know, this is just going to make for a lazier, fatter MS. Back in the day, they really had to struggle tooth and nail to pulverise a smaller company and devour its juicy fragments. Now, it seems that all it has to do is *say* it's coming out with a "PDF-Killah", Adobe will go bankrupt or something equally stupid, and MS could just be like, "Oh, I guess PDF's aren't so bad, especially now that we now own that format." If we're going to deal with a grossly incompetent company shipping a majority of the software, let's make that puppy really work it to get some love.
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
Of course the article is slashdotted so I can't get the details on the subject. But what does XDocs have to do with PDF? Last I heard it was being built to deal specifically with XML documents and XSLT to transform them into documents and forms for user input. Has something changed with the file layout of the document/form?
I think I triggered the bullshit bingo alert with the previous post.
These kind of things are bound to happen when talking about XML webservices in .net for a proactive leveraging of the end-user prod -*BINGO*
-Doh'
XDocs might be a threat to pdf in the field of online forms processing, as described in this zdnet article. Today pdf is used extensively in organizations that administer large quantities of paper forms that are sent to them.
But I don't think it can threaten pdf in other areas, because pdf is very, very established as the standard for online read-only documents. For instance, when I was looking for a new job earlier this year, I used Open Office to generate pdf files containing my applications that I sent to employers, and I didn't get a single complaint that they couldn't read it.
I'm sure some people distribute documents as PDFs because they can just refer people to Adobe for a free PDF reader. It occurred to me that OpenOffice fulfils a similar role. Now, if people wanted to start distributing SXW documents they could just refer their audience to OpenOffice.org for the free reader *and editor*.
THIS IS WHAT MONOPOLIES DO!
Personally, I find .pdf files a pain - they are memory intensive and usually the machine I am working on doesn't have Acrobat loaded on it (already noted here).
If MS can make this a simpler and more ubiquitous process, then so be it.... Adobe has a hell of lot more going for it than Acrobat - why didn't they just sell it to MS for a profit and be done with it? Adobe makes money and their Acrobat becomes a defacto standard....we are from the government - we are here to help...
can anyone remember the last time they actually came up with something innovative ? All they do is examine markets, pick one with only one large competitor and rewrite the software in an inferior way.
Fortunately, there's a big difference with netscape : netscape was a small company, the web was still in its infancy. Adobes pdf market (press) on the other hand is a billion dollar industry and adobe has quite a tad of experience with lawsuits. I doubt they'll just sit and scream murder...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
is here:
s p
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xdocs/default.a
Can somebody explain this to me?
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xdocs/faq.asp
Q. What is XML and what does it have to do with XDocs?
A. XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is an open, industry-standard language for data. Having data in XML means that the information is transportable and can be easily shared and reused.
The native file format for XDocs is XML, and XDocs supports any customer-defined schema, which means that information gathered using XDocs forms will be easier to integrate with server systems. Using XDocs to gather information can thus improve the flow of information throughout the organization. XDocs is a great example of how the upcoming releases of Office products are taking advantage of XML technology to help people, teams, and organizations manage and use information more productively.
I feel exactly the same about *.doc *.xls *.ppt and *.vsd!
Long live xhtml. (and TeX).
The MS Xdoc page Here Why does XML need to be application specific? Why do I need Office 11 to get this kind of quick and easy work done using XML? I don't :)
XML is popping up all over the place from Everquest to Mozilla.
Sure, Apple uses PDF in its new GUI, which is a slow, bloated pig of an unusable interface, and PDF files themselves are bloated pigs in terms of file size.
I haven't read the article yet, because I CAN'T.
Apple can switch to XML to sort out it's GUI and not have to rely on odd voodoo PDF to get it on screen.
Do this and I may buy an iMac. And an iPod. and that MAC stuff so my girlfriend can sit a few feet away from me and I get to smell her gentle, sweet perfume while she types away.
Wait, damn! Gonna get on tomorrow. :)
The source of this project is all GPLed and it seems (from the outside) to be ready for prime-time.
While I can understand the want for being compatible with other formats, why aren't more people/groups using this format, which (by being GPL) is universally compatible? (And why doesn't Ghostview support it?).
- Serge Wroclswski
I was being serious. This actually is what Bill Gates did do the first time he went on the internet (in 1994 I believe); I remember reading about it online.
It is part of Microsoft's strategy to do every little thing they can to make moving away from Microsoft software more difficult. Now that people are starting to buy Via/Lindows desktops, and replace Microsoft Office with Openoffice/Staroffice in business, Microsoft will be looking at a way of making those kinds of movements more of a hassle. Not being able to read a standardised properterial Microsoft format will be a big obstical.
>blockquote>I have to go and install some v.slow and large application to load them.
How is this any different from Word Documents?
Exactly the opposite experience here. Open office crawls on this machine while ms office xp really flies. I'm using a pentium II 350 so it's not exactly a state of the art machine.
Jilles
If the XDoc format is based around XML it is going to be VERY easy to take it apart, find out how the formatting is structured and then produce a program that can display it.
The only potential nasties are patents but these can (usually) be avoided.
I think MS are trying to achieve a couple of things here.
1 - Sell Office 11 - no one wants it - people realise (now - at last... sigh) that MS has been diddling them for years. Most people never actually needed much more than Office97. Except of course it doesn't run properly on 2K or XP.
2 - To me this looks like MS trying to avoid Javascript and DHTML. They neither own or like these formats and in theory you could redesign the Windows GUI using them. This doesn't make them happy.
I doubt they give a rats arse about Adobe who are a mere minnow compared to MS.... It's always suprised me the MS haven't gone after the Flash/Shockwave plugin market TBH.
"None of this shit works" -W.Shatner
I had this issue too on a laptop at the weekend. Thankfully I was connected to the internet so I just plugged the URL into google and it provided an option to convert it to HTML.
Of course, it's not exactly the best conversion in the world, but at least you can read what is in the file.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
innovation Pronunciation Key (n-vshn)
n.
What planet {Gates whine or not} do you live on? A day does not go by that I don't get a fsking word document e-mailed to me.
"God is dead." - Frederik Nietzsche
Fantastic. I really hate pdf files and the sooned they are destroyed the better,
Sig is taking a break!
How is this going to challenge PDF as a general document distribution format? Microsoft has already said that Office 11 will only run on WinXP or Win2K SP3, which would limit the audience that could read the new format.
How is this any different from Word Documents?
To people at our company, where Windows and Office is installed on every machine, very different.
To avoid your obvious 'install adobe then' answer, n not many people need it. To have a rarely used file format require a specific piece of software to load it is not a great sitation, in my view.
I hate them too, different reason. Even though all my computers can view (acrobat) the PDF format, I'd always prefer not to. It locks the text down to one paper layout format, destroying all of the advantages computers can bring to perusing text. Microsoft Word(tm) you can at least repaginate.
I wonder if PDF was somehow invented by the printer manufacturers to stave off the arrival of paperless office.
I can't read the slashdotted article right now, but if by "immediate hit" they mean that the stock jumped almost 12% in one day, they're right. Of course, maybe that's just related to their confirmation of projected 4th quarter earnings.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
One - I guess Bill wants it ALL, doesn't he?
.pdf - PLEASE let it have BOOKMARKS.....
Two - I hope this new format supports one thing thats driven me NUTS about
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Also there have been very FEW viruses that infect PDF's, imagine the viruses that will be written for M$'s version.
In effect, Microsoft depends on its users - largely technology ignorant - to push its technologies into areas of resistance regardless of the problems it causes. It is so like the old IBM that one can only assume the managers read IBM internal memos before bedtime. Except that IBM had better R&D, a wider range of products, and a captive market for mainframes...and it still ended up in trouble.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
You begin to wonder if Microsoft is trying to attack Apple. It is no secret that Apple has very close ties with Adobe. The way that Mac OS X has integrated PDFs into their OS has revolutionalized my use of PDFs from "Oh no, someone has their documentation in PDF instead of HTML" to "Oh cool, I can save my print previews as PDF and save tons of paper." Obviously, they are a little concern since they tried their own switcher campaign.
At least with Microsoft involved, we'll never have to worry about truly unbreakable copy protection in PDFs!
Dupe posts are
PDF is owned by Adobe, right? Why is there not a free format out there? I am not happy about M$ trying to own the formats (I am all for them making software that uses them though, that is good), but the same goes for Apple, Adobe, IBM, your momma. This is not confined to Microsoft, it is simply that it has a much larger impact when they move around.
We have gotten ogg, png, etc that is free (and not used enough, throw out all your GIF right now, ok...) and at least as good as the competition (actually better, but the point is very valid). Why not a free set of formats for documents and such?
(side note: MacOS X uses pdf for displaying graphics, isn't it time for a free GUI with the same kind of power? Down with X;))
But surely the ideal solution would be for M$ Word to support PDF docs. That would please all users.
REDMOND - Software giant Microsoft announced today that it would introduce a document sharing technology supporting several platforms, including Linux and other variants of Unix.
Code-named XFud, the technology will allow a propaganda document written using Microsoft Office on Windows XP to be easily opened by a Linux user. "We realized that we need to reach a wider audience with our FUD, and XFud will be the key to that," said XFud product manager Chuck Spittle. "We're anticipating 90% industry acceptance within 18 months."
Mr. Spittle brushed aside criticisms of a controversial feature of XFud known as "XObey". The technology is said to greatly enhance a reader's memory and understanding of online documents by altering the monitor's refresh rate, causing mild hypnosis while reading. "Most people zone out in front of the computer anyway", said Spittle. "We're just going to use that zone-out time in a productive way."
It's funny, moderators. Consider laughing.
Except you generally have to pay for the slow, bloated application!
And now, Ladys and Gentlemen,
/., or whatever?
"...a new Microsoft PDF-killer technology..."
PDF-Killer. Yeah! New Technology! WOOOOP! Developers, developers, developers! Yeah. GIVE IT UP FOR ME! Dig it. WHO TOLD YOU TO SIT DOWN??? *hopping, screeching, headbutting and making satan-finger-sighns*
Dear Stockbrokers, M$ CEOs and Marketeers, what ever you smoked, don't ever offer me anything of it.
"PDF-Killer"...I just don't believe all this. Is this just me or the world or
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There's a misunderstanding here. PDF isn't some sort of 'portable' file format for documents. Anyone who tries to use it for keeping or sharing a 'living' document deserves all they get. It's not even particularly good for presenting information - XHTML is better for that.
PDF is good for two things: precise control over appearance, and stability. When you look at a PDF, there's a good chance that what you see is pretty much what the writer/designer intended you to see - and the designer knows that.
When you open a file into an MS Office app, on the other hand, all bets are off. Fonts, margins, colours, line weights, even element positions, are liable to change *undetectably*. If you're using anything other than the *exact* same version that it was originally created in, with the same fonts installed and the same templates on your machine, it's even worse.
I'm a document engineer. I spend much of my life writing, processing and designing documents using MS Office (mostly Word and Excel, with a liberal injection of VBA); but when I've finished, the format I turn to for storage is PDF. Because I have reasonable confidence that it will *last*. And when I come to open it again a year later, I don't want to be wondering who else has opened it and maybe changed it in the meantime.
If you can open an XDOC directly into an editor, then it may be a good way of saving, sharing, collaborating on 'working' documents. But that's a completely different market from PDF.
MS has had Office viewers available at least on Windows for several years now.br?
And B) Those of you who bitch about MS putting the letter "X" in everything don't seem to care that Apple puts "Power" or "Talk" in everything, often with no parallelism between name and product type. Apple was especially bad in the AOCE/PowerTalk days. Of course, now Apple uses "i" for new stuff.
Portable Document Format. As in documents you can edit. You don't happen to have missed the fact that you can actually load and edit PDF files just like DOC files if you have an application which can handle it?
On my linux box, DOCs are just as limited for me as PDFs are for you.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
PDF is widely used in the printing industry. It allows metadata and can be used in a workflow.
-Kevin
.pdf is a major ballache? how about fucking .doc? take the irritation of .pdf (with it's FREELY downlaodable cross-platform reading client) and multiply by a fucking million with .doc and it's $400 Mac and Win only MS Office shitbag client.
Fuck Microsoft
That was classic intercourse!
Site is unaccessible.
.Net server products, Microsoft can address both sides of the forms equation.
.Net server components, as it most likely will be, Microsoft will have a significant selling point.
Read the articale here before replying:
XDocs vs. Adobe:
_POSTEDON 2002-10-31 13:07:47 by Linux Format Admin
Microsoft hyperdaz writes "Two weeks ago Microsoft announced XDocs, a new application that will be part of the upcoming Office 11 suite.
XDocs, according to Microsoft, will make it easier to create richly formatted online forms, and to simplify the collection of form data. Because it uses XML, XDocs form data should integrate with a variety of data repositories with relative ease.
The first reaction from tech pundits was to proclaim that a mortal blow had been struck against Adobe, the PDF file format, and Adobe's Acrobat family of PDF manipulation products. Adobe's stock took an immediate hit, and some analysts went so far as to compare Adobe to erstwhile MS competitor Netscape.
It's a bit premature to be ringing alarm bells for Adobe, though. XDocs will be a strong challenge to certain facets of Acrobat, but there are significant differences between the two products, and where they are similar, Adobe is in a position to put up a good fight.
XDocs's obvious challenge to Acrobat is in the online forms market.
In that narrow field, it's clear why XDocs is perceived as a threat: Forms, by their nature, require a client and a server. Between their virtual lock on the office productivity suite market and the popularity of SQL Server, Exchange, and the rest of the
While PDF forms can be integrated with backend sources like SAP and PeopleSoft, XDocs forms will be able to do this as well, according to Microsoft, and if XDocs is deeply integrated into Exchange and other
While Acrobat Reader may be everywhere, it's safe to say that it probably isn't used as often as Office, and Microsoft could gain an advantage in the forms market simply by producing a well designed, easy-to-use product with a user interface that's familiar and inviting to people who already use the other Office products regularly. Adobe's defense against this has been to make it possible to create PDFs from any application, including Office. How these differences will work out competitively remains to be seen, and depend on how well XDocs is executed, and how well both Adobe and Microsoft educate potential customers.
But it's important to remember that most people don't use PDFs for online forms--in fact, many people aren't aware that they even can be used for that purpose. The most common use of PDF is to securely distribute documents that can be viewed and printed consistently across different platforms. XDocs, judging from Microsoft's announcements to date, doesn't address these features, and for the foreseeable future Adobe has this market to itself. What this means is that XDocs is unlikely to take market share away from PDF--what Microsoft appears to be trying to do is limit the growth of PDF, because PDF's true strengths in secure document distribution and printing remain unchallenged.
Well before the XDocs announcements, though, Adobe was expanding the forms functionality of PDF.
"PDF is evolving beyond a document format, and is now a rich information container," according to Julie McEntee, Director of Product Management for Adobe. As part of that effort Adobe recently announced a new, more forms-friendly version of Acrobat Reader, and beefed up its line of PDF server products. And PDF has supported XML for a number of years."
you dumb fucking bastard
got a banner ad at the top that says create PDFs for free! lol.
Surely you saw this coming? .doc, and just as only-MS-can-read-it-style.
MS decides to use Xml for doc. interchange. Yeah, they can futz with it, but it's trivial to work out what they're doing, as it's human readable. The idea is that finished documents would leave in this new format, and it will be just as tricky to read as
You didn't think they were going to let just *anyone* read documents created on Windog, did you?
Tom Newton
Not true! PDF is designed as a display/rendering format, not an editable document format. Generally SGML or XML content is rendered into PDF and then PDF is rendered into output.
-Kevin
Yeah, but Excel was not the best product when it came out Quattro Pro was much better, but it was not free when you bought a computer. I am still trying to get Excel to read my mind correctly, so I can get the graphs and charts that I indicated it should produce. Also, Windows is still around, so the best product does not always get the support of the market.
hey, its M$. do you expect anything less?
... the SECOND time!! ...
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
I for one will stay with PDF for a while.
XDocs and PDF are so widely different, that it amazes me that this correlation could be even considered. XDocs and PDF are no more similar as Slashdot is to a banana!
PDF is a multi-purpose page description language, primarily used to represent the printed page on screen. It is the central element to Adobe's modern digital publishing workflow.
XDocs is an extensive corporate forms tool based around XML.
At best, XDocs is competing with a VERY SMALL PART of what PDF can do -- forms.
Simon
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Portable Document Format. As in documents you can edit.
Yeah, with an application you have to pay for. Don't wee hate that round here?
For all you guys trying to read the article and cannot, here some more infos: The actual announcement is about a month old. Here's one story on internetnews (ty to /. this) covering this; and a follow-up.
An alternative story can be found at Betanews.
BTW, creating XML-documents out of M$-Word-documents is not a new idea. Check out icoya WordXML (click solutions, than icoya WordXML). It is a high performance extension for Microsoft Word in order to convert content easily into the open, format-neutral and manufacturer-independent XML format.
Thank you for input to the discussion. You might even be able to submit this post for your course in stating the bleeding obvious.
It is actually largely because it was the better product.
Remember, Lotus 1-2-3 had a monopoly in the DOS world. MSFT begged them to develop it for Windows 1... it begged them to develop it for Windows 2...
Lotus went and developed 1-2-3 for OS/2
Microsoft ported its (moderately sucessful) Apple spreadsheet Excel to Windows. Da dah!
Windows becomes the de facto GUI for PCs; Excel the de facto spreadsheet.
In this case, it won because it was the best product on the most popular platform. By the time Lotus got a product out (and what a dog it was) it was too late.
--- My dad's political betting
And this is precisely what I look for when I publish a document for public or customer consumption. I want the final image of the document locked down, unmodifiable, the way I intend it to be. No messing with the formatting, fonts, colours or anything else that I carefully put together to convey my message.
To too many people a document is just text. This is far from the truth. A document is a presentation, and says a lot about the person or organisation that prepared it. From technical notes to marketting, control over document format is a vital part of publishing.
And that is why PDF kicks the arse of other formats when it comes to this type of use.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
from the faq:
"This comes under the general category of "don't sweat the small stuff." "Interesting" and "Insightful" will have the same effect on the comment, and the difference between the two is basically just a judgment call. Rate the moderation "Fair," and move on. "
According to this timeline, M$ was found to be a monopoly back in 1999 - and I thought that was the second time, but I couldn't find anything that backs up my vague memories of that right now.
The labels/convictions don't actually seem to slow M$ down much, and from what I've read so far, CKK's ruling isn't gonna do much either.
Russ
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
I'm wondering if this is actually targetted at limiting one of the supposed strengths of MAC OS X - it's tight integration with all things postscript. (AFAIK, it supports pdf at OS level.. If I am correct then this could be a potential motivation. MS could want to kill Apple's "media center" rather than worry about further competetion - even if Apple is only a bit player.)
XDocs is only Microsoft's front-end application for modifying XML (which the original slashdot post never mentioned). XDoc is positioned as a Word-like way of manipulating XML form data (Screenshot).
If anything, XML will be the PDF-killer. Adobe trapped themselves into a corner when they devoted themselves to a proprietary file format instead of using XML. With everyone jumping on the XML bandwagon, no wonder Adobe's stockholders are getting nervous.
What part of PDF is an E? There's nothing editable about it. The non-editabilty of PDFs is a selling point, an advertised feature. They're normally hard to edit, and if the author specifies it, supposedly impossible.
Adobe went to court to stop people from cracking the PDF "encryption" (and they're winning, kinda. Except that their witness and their defendant are both barred from returning to the US)
On my desktop Linux box, OpenOffice/Kword/Abiword edit DOCs fairly well. Sometimes they fail and I have to just try to suck out the ASCII. Just like when PDF fails.
On my portable Linux box, with a 320x240 screen, I can read a DOC file, because the line widths will adjust to fit. I can see a tiny corner of a PDF file, but I can't read it. Portable indeed!
Isn't SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) the replacement for PDF? It's even a W3C recommendation (http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG).
Oh wait... It's an open standard, and Adobe already has the most used SVG renderer in Windows. MS can't have that.
Adobe tried to make PDF widely used for that purpose but failed. And that's quite fortunate: PDF's page oriented format isn't all that hot for on-line forms either.
" You can't even cut and paste from Acrobat"
Sorry to burst your bubble but not only can you cut and paste from acrobat, you can cut and paste from text in images with on-the-fly OCR...
graspee
It locks the text down to one paper layout format, destroying all of the advantages computers can bring to perusing text. Microsoft Word(tm) you can at least repaginate.
You can view PDFs because you have Acrobat reader installed. This is precisely what PDF is about, and also having platform independant layout for a document. PDF documents are not meant to be edited, only the source document is.
If the document you read have a messy layout, this is a design issue, not a file format one.
May I use your sig please?
The reason that IE succeeded is that they delivered an slightly better product than netscape at a time when people were starting to use the net at record numbers.
When MS tried to convert a world firmly entrenched in MP3s to their WMA format they got basicly nowhere. I guess it has had moderate success in competing with Real's product line, but that's really only because Real's software cannot run 2 seconds without crashing on most systems I've been around.
My prediction: Unless they can blow PDF out of the water (which they could do), MS's new format will be something you use once or twice a month max.
Click here to read too much about my personal life
Simpler even, Acrobat is a commercial product but the format, PDF, is an open format. It will never go away because of that and because of the wide range of implementations/tools readilly available.
Ack you're right. I've gone insane. Sorry about that.
-Kevin
I fail to see the threat in all this. The only thing that distinguishes PDF from any other format is the way it's handled. They treat it like this sterile god-given piece of magic, when it's really just a load of Postscript wrapped with proprietary tags.
XDocs is probably just MS Word doc format with a few extra tags for content control and author signatures. As long as the renderers remain consistent across platforms then it's no better/worse than PDF. It's the viewer software that makes the difference. You could practically define the specifics about rendering HTML a certain way, and call that set of rules a PDF-Killer, because the only thing Adobe has going that the others don't is consistency.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Umm, have you tried the Text Select Tool on the toolbar (Reader 5.0, don't know about earlier versions). Once in Text Select Mode, you can cut-n-paste to your heart's content.
XDoc s as others have pointed out is a forms technology, not a competitor with PDF in all areas. However, Adobe purchased Accelio earlier in the year, who make a forms authoring and serving product (formerly known variously as FormFlow, ReachForms, RichForms); Adobe just relaunched the product line a week ago, realigning the company somewhat around server products.
Hence the impact of this announcement. If you've actually used the Accelio stuff (and I have, a lot) you'll know that it could be massively improved upon; other products are biting at their heels already.
So MS weighs in immediately after Adobe's fanfare and says they're going to enter the market (note that XDocs does not even have a release date yet!) - its hardly surprising that Adobe's stock takes a hit.
You cannot, however, get Adobe Acrobat 5.x for free from Adobe's website (to be able to edit files). Nor is there another free utility (that I know about at least) that lets you edit existing PDF files.
Furthermore, Adobe Acrobat Reader does not kill its process when you exit. It happily hangs around eating up your memory, which makes it a pain in the ass to use on older computers without 74 gigafloppy interweb RAMs of memory (that's technical talk for "a lot of memory" by the way).
I think that if Apple or a third party came up with a non-Adobe solution for a PDF-like document, that could easily kill Microsoft's idea. Or, you can create confusion by offering so many choices that the user just says "F- that! I'll just stick with what I have."
Also, the original's story comparison of this to IE vs. Netscape is a bit faulty. There's no real reason for Joe McRegularUser to have both Internet Explorer and Netscape. Both will allow him to check NBA scores and hot asian teen pix. However, unless this Microsoft application can now handle PDF files as well (my winword.exe only spits out gibberish), AAR will always be necessary. It's kind of akin to me really really hating RealNetworks, but still having bloated GUIware like RealPlayer installed because there's no other real option (pun intended). Just because I have the new XCrap.net document editor, doesn't mean that I don't need Adobe Acrobat Reader.
My solution to this whole big mess? Do what warez kiddies do. Just releases everything in
Of course Microsoft would write back and say that now Edit.com will be integrated into Office, Windows Media Player, and Microsoft Soccer.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Would you still consider it a monopoly abuse if you knew Microsoft implements the XDocs application using XML?
IIRC, Tim Berners-Lee gave the new MS Office 11 XML implementation a thumbs up.
and create a new standard called XXXDoc. that would be really useful, instead of this other crap XDoc. Think about how much network congestion caused by pr0n would disappear to leave a faster surfing experience.
PDF is published.
There are free interpreters.
I thought Apple was using Display Postscript, not PDF. Didn't gnustep make a Display Ghostscript?
I usually use gv in Linux for viewing pdfs which AFAIK doesn't allow cut & paste.
-Kevin
Many enhancements over PDF, including: ...but unfortunately with MS marketing it might even catch on :(
- Windows-only support
- Enforces "Digital Restrictions Management"
- Break the format at every new Office version
- EULA that gives MS copyright for all your documents
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Adobe has been touting their cross media publishing as their main growth segment. OEM and licensing of their postscript technology continues to fall, revenue is down for all the authoring software(including photoshop), and their one bright spot is the continued growth from sales and licensing in their epaper division (read acrobat/pdf). epaper is about 20% of their net income and the majority of their sales growth at this point.
f s/ 2001_ar.pdf
If you want somethign to go with your coffee, read this annual report.
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pd
I used Open Office to generate pdf files containing my applications that I sent to employers, and I didn't get a single complaint that they couldn't read it.
.doc files and can't read my CV, I ignore them by principle.
As for myself, I distribute my CV using PDF aswell, and if the prospective employer or employment agency comes back to me complaining that they only work with MSWORD
I haven't read the article, because I can't get through to it. But I think that MS might have a chance even if they are a bit late. They were late with their internet explorer but eventually they won. Perhaps they can win this one too, but it will take a lot of work. They need to give out readers for free for all major platforms, and ofcourse implement support in IE or Windows. Perhaps even make Office plugins free so everyone can start making XDoc-documents, even with an old version of Office. Maybe then they can outcompete PDF.
Its not just the format I hate, but that whole category of use. "Good for what it does, but what it does isn't good"
A document is a presentation
That is the bad viewpoint that I wish PDF didn't promulgate. I know, I know, Adobe is just responding to demands of the market...
so I really have to focus my ire against the unwashed masses who think they're graphics designers and that they actually need fancy layouts. Or at the even greater masses who allow themselves to be swayed by such trivalities.
The kind of publishing that needs formatting, fonts, and color is mainly about deception. With rare exceptions, text is the truth, and the window-dressing tries to hide it. From Madison Avenue advertising shills to corporate Annual Report polishers to the legions of "PowerPoint(tm)
Engineers" infesting government contracting, its all about getting your words to be judged by something other than what they say.
Many authors aren't concious about doing this- they just want to fit in with everyone else- but that doesn't make it any more honest.
(Yes, there are people who prepare truely graphical data, and who need to lay it out precisely. They are in the minority)
(Yes, for content not delivered over computer- flattened wood pulp or something- carefully prepared alignment is an aid to comprehensibility. But there's no reason to carry this forward into the digital era).
In a more ideal future, all presentation issues will be decided on the client side. You send me the data, and I've configured my software to present it the way I prefer. It won't happen for a while yet, but I can dream. And the continued use of PDF blocks this dream.
Remember the AARD code? The reason Real crashes so much on windows is because of MS's deliberate incompatability. Try running realplayer in wine sometimes. Most of the times it works perfectly, not bad for an alpha level emulator. Of course, that is realplayer 8, not sure about realone.
XDocs has almost nothing to do with pdf. Please read the article or the description of xdocs on MS site.
.Net server products, Microsoft can address both sides of the forms equation.
.Net server components, as it most likely will be, Microsoft will have a significant selling point.
It is basically a way to create a front-end for XML docs or XML web services. This way, a user can say, well this field is a drop-down and this one is a date field and this is how I want to arrange it on a screen. While they are doing this, they are linking the fields to nodes in the XML doc.
Think of it as a MS Access gui front-end tool over an XML source. It's focus is data entry not presentation, exactly the opposite of PDF.
If you think xdocs and acrobat are equivalent, then the same could be said about any word processor or html editor or desktop publishing tool, etc.
Article:
---
XDocs vs. Adobe:
POSTEDON 2002-10-31 13:07:47 by Linux Format Admin
Microsoft hyperdaz writes "Two weeks ago Microsoft announced XDocs, a new application that will be part of the upcoming Office 11 suite.
XDocs, according to Microsoft, will make it easier to create richly formatted online forms, and to simplify the collection of form data. Because it uses XML, XDocs form data should integrate with a variety of data repositories with relative ease.
The first reaction from tech pundits was to proclaim that a mortal blow had been struck against Adobe, the PDF file format, and Adobe's Acrobat family of PDF manipulation products. Adobe's stock took an immediate hit, and some analysts went so far as to compare Adobe to erstwhile MS competitor Netscape.
It's a bit premature to be ringing alarm bells for Adobe, though. XDocs will be a strong challenge to certain facets of Acrobat, but there are significant differences between the two products, and where they are similar, Adobe is in a position to put up a good fight.
XDocs's obvious challenge to Acrobat is in the online forms market.
In that narrow field, it's clear why XDocs is perceived as a threat: Forms, by their nature, require a client and a server. Between their virtual lock on the office productivity suite market and the popularity of SQL Server, Exchange, and the rest of the
While PDF forms can be integrated with backend sources like SAP and PeopleSoft, XDocs forms will be able to do this as well, according to Microsoft, and if XDocs is deeply integrated into Exchange and other
While Acrobat Reader may be everywhere, it's safe to say that it probably isn't used as often as Office, and Microsoft could gain an advantage in the forms market simply by producing a well designed, easy-to-use product with a user interface that's familiar and inviting to people who already use the other Office products regularly. Adobe's defense against this has been to make it possible to create PDFs from any application, including Office. How these differences will work out competitively remains to be seen, and depend on how well XDocs is executed, and how well both Adobe and Microsoft educate potential customers.
But it's important to remember that most people don't use PDFs for online forms--in fact, many people aren't aware that they even can be used for that purpose. The most common use of PDF is to securely distribute documents that can be viewed and printed consistently across different platforms. XDocs, judging from Microsoft's announcements to date, doesn't address these features, and for the foreseeable future Adobe has this market to itself. What this means is that XDocs is unlikely to take market share away from PDF--what Microsoft appears to be trying to do is limit the growth of PDF, because PDF's true strengths in secure document distribution and printing remain unchallenged.
Well before the XDocs announcements, though, Adobe was expanding the forms functionality of PDF.
"PDF is evolving beyond a document format, and is now a rich information container," according to Julie McEntee, Director of Product Management for Adobe. As part of that effort Adobe recently announced a new, more forms-friendly version of Acrobat Reader, and beefed up its line of PDF server products. And PDF has supported XML for a number of years."
---
FUD (about MS) & fantasy (about open source) - seems to be the specialty of many slashdotters.
An actual example: P4/1700 with 768 M of RAM, an 71 MB XLS workbook, 4 sheets, hardly any formulas at all, but 2 of the 4 sheets stuffed chockfull with numeric data.
Opening time in Excel: 5 seconds.
XL's memory use with the workbook open: 134M.
Opening time in OO-Calc: 2 minutes 56 seconds.
Memory use: 275M.
At that moment it muttered something about "not all rows imported", and refused to show any data from two of the four sheets.
Opening the same data from CSV files instead of an Excel workbook:
Excel: approx 5 seconds per file for the largest two, 1 second each for the other two.
OO-Calc: approx. 20 seconds to open the first 32000 lines (round, not 32K) of the first CSV file, after which it gave up with "row limit exceeded". It had already exceeded XL's total time for all four files by then, so I didn't bother trying to open the rest.
Try to open a smaller excel workbook that contains graphs, and all OO-Calc will do is crash its nose into the ground.
If you want to play with a 100 row spreadsheet or so at home, get OpenOffice.
If you need something that's fast and works without crashing every five minutes: use Office.
I used Open Office to generate pdf files containing my applications that I sent to employers, and I didn't get a single complaint that they couldn't read it.
Probably because the way the tech job market is right now, not one of them tried...
All they have to do is make it completely compatible with Adobe's PDF format and give it away for free, bundled with MS Office. By the time they have version 2.x around, everybody will start using their version of "print to pdf". it will still be compatible with Adobe's PDF, but it will come with "enhancements" that acrobat reader can't read. This time they'll release their own reader. By the time version 3.x comes around, they will have embraced and extended the pdf format and at the same time obliterated the competiton.
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xdocs/default.asp
Really not read much into it, but i think it does show its more XML editor than PDF likeness *shrugs*
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
It is perfectly cross platform
until that is m$ decides that there's some incredibly pressing security reason (or drm, adobe's encryption *must* obviously be weak if a russian can crack it) to not include pdf support in longhorn.
MS's only strong point could be integration
that's the truly scary thing about m$; they have the ability at will to lock out competitors from 95% of the destop market. (yes, i know i deserve an award for stating the obvious there)....i.e., their other "strong point" could simply be "you want a printed-doc file format on windows? USE THIS...no pdf for j00!" i mean, imagine if instead of simply undercutting navigator, m$ had deliberately made it completely non-funtional under win, under the guse "well, the browser accesses some pretty important system functions, so for security reasons, we're really rather only our own products do that" - "well, pdf encryption is sort of weak, and as well it's an open standard, so godless commies can easily crack it and 'share' all the copyrighted goodness inside - so we're not going to support pdf on longhorn, you'll need to use our file format."
hell, wouldn't surprise me to see m$ peddling some sort of postscript replacement for the desktop in a couple of years.
sorry if this is an incoherent rant, i haven't had all my coffee yet. i think there's a good point lurking in there somwhere.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
All together now...
I Pledge Allegiance
To the Flag
That Appears on my Desktop Startup Screen.
And to the Monopoly
For Which it Stands;
One Operating System
Over All,
Inescapable,
With Freedom and Privacy for none.
(Sorry, couldn't resist. Feel free to mod me down.)
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Why isn't it installed by default on each workstation as is Office? It's not as if you have to pay for Acrobat Reader. When I install a PC, Acrobat Reader it is put on the machine even before Office.
I think you should complain to the IT guys at your workplace. After all it is their job to make sure common files are readable.
Um, perhaps the article writer/analyst wasn't aware of this, but Adobe makes other products besides Acrobat. Anyone remember photoshop? premier? etc?
I've often wondered if Bill (the wanker) Gates
has been secretly obsessed with XWindows.
It seems as though MS has been deliberately
trying to dilute the cool XWindows name with
stuff since 1994.
Embraced and Extended Markup Language.
The CKK judgement was suppoosed to be released after the close of markets to stave off a run of share transfers before the weekend.
According to él Register the report was emailed out 2 hours before time, which meant trading could happen for those fortunate enough to get such a mail before everyone else. Slashdot even reported it _before_ time.
http://theregister.co.uk/content/4/27910.html
Also interesting is the analysis
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If they didn't, you would think that Mr Power of the FCC would have at least looked at the Time/AOL merger document.
Your country started with over 100 car manufacturers. Now you have 2.5. Dubya said himself that it would be easier with just ONE operating system to support. And only on place for the Republicans to get their donations from.
If this were a dictatorship, it would be a lot easier. So long as I'm the dictator. - FURHER GWBUSH
You just need a small critical mass of people upgrading to an incompatable format to force everyone else to upgrade in defence. After all, with all the feature-bloat, what could they add to Office that would cause any sane user to pay out for an upgrade? SuperClippy?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It'll never catch on......It'll be worse than Corel Envoy was... The PDF became a standard only when the Commercial Printing and Graphic arts community accepted it as a standard... No one in that community likes microsoft one bit......Dont even get me or anyone else working in the above industry started about microsoft and its bugs, office is the worst culprit of them all.....The last shop I worked at charged a 15% surcharge if the clients files were microsoft.
The folks that made the pdf a standard, the designers & pre press tech's wont ever trust a replacement from microsoft.
The only way this would even begin to work is if MS's implementation is readable by every OS. The generation of the PDF is one thing, but its sucess is because it is easily accessed on every platform. Not only that, but since its become a household standard, free alternatives exist to generate the actual documents.
MS isn't competing with Adobe, they are competing with a standard.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
The PDF file is one of the absolute worst standards to come along in the computer industry in years. It sucks. Yet everyone insists on using it. I cringe everytime I write a manual, convert it to PDF, and know that 9 times out of 10 someone's going to have problems either reading it, printing it, or reading their print out of it.
I don't care if it's open source or geek chic, or if it's difficult to work with....just give me something else to use before I go insane.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I'm no fan of Adobe. They abuse a dominant position, too (take Photoshop's most recent changes with "improving" tiffs).
However, saying all HTML needs to match PDF is page breaks is like saying all a Pinto needs to take on a Porsche is not to explode.
PDFs are entirely editable in many applications. They can include font data. They include everything needed to output cleanly on a variety of output devices. They are made to look the same on screen as they will on output devices. They solve many of the main problems with delivering files to press.
HTML is markup. PDF is page description. There is an enormous difference.
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
A few years ago X-something meant an X11 or some other Unix program. Nowadays it seems more and more obvious that they're trying to make people associate the X letter to Windows related stuff.
"XDocs," a code name for the newest member of the Microsoft Office family, streamlines the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms. The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because XDocs supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, XDocs helps to connect information workers directly to organizational information and gives them the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact.
Does that sound like a pdf killer to you? Does it even sound like they're after the same market? Sure they're using XML and they're making "documents" - still sounds more like Lotus Notes than Acrobat. But who uses Acrobat/PDF to collect data? Yes, there are forms in PDF, but the implementation is not nearly flexible enough to build a data collection application, nor can you build decent data collection apps around MS Word.
XDocs is designed to work with any customer-defined XML schema. Where's the proprietary nature there? You give it your proprietary schema and then you use it to build forms to collect data into that schema. All Microsoft is doing is implementing a framework to easilly collect and present information. This is exactly what Lotus Notes was doing more than 5 years ago, only with XDocs the collected data is stored using your XML DTD instead of Lotus's proprietary NSF format. I'm sure Microsoft will extend it to the web - just using an XSL transform to change the XDoc into HTML and collect your data that way.
None of this prevents you from using a PDF to archive resulting documents. To be sure, you can probably embed an XDoc form into an XML dataset and view the resulting file with an XDoc viewer - but that's still one more app that everyone needs, and PDF is still the best portable format for archiving all sorts of documents and images. XDoc just collects information. Yes... all very insidious of Microsoft. A PDF killer.. I don't think so. I don't even see it as a PDF competitor.
Working for a large print company I can assure you that is not the intent. The paperless office will come regardless of what the dying print companies attempt to do.
Some of the better print companies are trying to standardize on XML-based formats rather than relying solely on PDF and/or PostScript.
PDF-like documents, where the layout and text are "frozen", will always be needed as long as marketing and sales folks want their electronic documents to "look nice" and stay that way.
The Kwisatz Haderach shall come again...
I forget the name of the program, but MS had an vector-based animation equivalent of Flash 3 and 4. Look where it is now....
Actually, yes, it is. Around the time of Windows 3.x, there was a fairly fundamental shift in the patterns of PC use towards a Windows platform. At that point, Excel smoked everything else on the market. Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows was a sad shadow of the once dominant spreadsheet, while Excel got the job done for a lot of people.
Erm... Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on anything much back then, though Windows was starting to become dominant. Word was up against WordPerfect and WordStar, and new kid on the block Ami Pro, which was arguably a better word processor at that time. Excel was up against a port of 1-2-3 to Windows, with a near 100% market share to break into. Even Windows itself wasn't a sure thing; OS/2 was a serious candidate, GEM was around albeit never really going anywhere, and of course Macs and such were there if you were doing serious design/publishing.
So, given that Microsoft had pretty much zilch leverage and no monopoly, how exactly were they going to ensure that their product won, other than by being better than the competition? I realise that you probably weren't born yet when all this happened, but do please try to write something vaguely correct if you're going to flame.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Now that M$ has been granted license to use their monopoly as they see fit, it is only right that they go after their competators with a vengence. Which buy the way if you havent noticed is down to less than a handful. Adobe seems to be the first target, Oracle and Semantic will be next then... Oh shit that's pretty all the big software vendors that I can think of. I guess when they are dead the medium and small companies will have to be next.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
"Adobe takes it on the PDF"?
Karma? What's that again?
The parent post makes an excellent point that many people haven't got yet:
XML without a published DTD or Schema (published both the scheme and how to interpret it) is just as proprietary as any other undisclosed file format.
... is here, since the site is refusing connections.
Every company rips of other ideas to some extent. What makes Microsoft unique is 1) their ability to leverage their monopoly in the process, 2) the general lack of new ideas, which belies 3) their constant claims of "innovation" (as a means to get customers and as a means to justify their unhindered existence.)
Ahhh, and then we move to the PDF format, which ironically was an application meant to provide an alternative to rich text Word documents. Not exactly any innovation there either, in fact, far more bloated and complicated than even Word could ever hope to be.
PDF isn't a bloated RTF document; it's far more than that whether or not you think it's an original idea. PDF allows you to specify the precise layout of a document, down to the locations of the letters and the outline version of the graphics. Try submitting a completed publication to a printers shop in RTF format and when you get the unpredictable-looking results you'll understand why PDF is useful.
Don't worry anybody... US court has just ruled the other day about Microsoft. Everything should be okay from now on... Don't worry for a moment.
Invest, invest, invest.
Even random is random. My nick, too.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What's the point? Everyone knows that Word documents are the only interchangeable document format you'll ever need.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
This is fucking hilarious. The article goes on about how XDocs isn't competition to Acrobat, yet none of the "pundits" even know how to read beyond the headline. Uh oh, Adobe better watch out, HTML is going to uproot their entire business.
Adobe wouldn't license Display Postscript to Apple, because PDF is supplanting Postscript. Apple didn't want to pay Adobe's fees to license their PDF engine, so they built a clean room implementation.
Net result was that Adobe lost a revenue stream, and OS X became a little more affordable. However the differences show themselves when you compare Acrobat reader with Preview.app (acrobat == slow & buggy carbon app, but with accurate rendering, Preview.app == fast & lean cocoa app, but with rendering problems on complex PDF). Also Distiller's PDF files are _much_ more optimized (ie downsampling, compression) than OS X quartz ones.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
XDocs sounds more like a competitor to xforms xforms is a new standard, but looks promissing
MS is going to use an XML document to replace PDFs? Isn't this what XSL:FO was designed for?
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
Remember MS DOS 7? Where did that go? Nowhere, but it kept people from buying the then latest version of DR DOS, which was better in all aspects and had more cool features.
It's hard to believe MS could do better than Adobe, but when MS controls the OS and seems to be able to do whatever they damn well please... I'd start having my own doubts about Adobe.
... insane. If Micro$oft Publisher is anything to go by, MS is about as close to a good and solid WYSIWYG format as we are to getting on a ship tommorow and blast off to Alpha Century.
.pub file only to have the job come back misalinged and the last paragraph of every article missing?
I mean, ever try and send soemthing off to print with a MS publisher
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
In a significant attempt to improve International Trolling(tm), the Association of Slashdot Trollers (AST) are holding a round-table conference in a mysterious location. This has reflected in the number of score 0 and above comments in
Officials of the AST were not available for further comments. However, one of the AST members who happened to be still trolling
For more info, logon to trollstation.com,
AOL Keyword: Slashdotroll
getSexySig();
It is not just a Lotus vs. Excel thing.
In 1993, Quattro Pro v.5 for windows had the best mascro fuctionality and was stable and easy to use. At that lime it was more 123'ish but better (and cheaper) than the lotus product.
Unfortunately, Novell gave up on Quattro Pro and by the time Corel picked it up it was 1997 and excel was totally entrenched. When Wordperfect office 2000 came out Corel had turned good software into unusable crap.
I don't know the politics behind Novell's lack of interest in Quattro Pro at THE most critical point, but they had the best spreadsheet for windows 3.1 hands down.
"As a businessman, I'll pay just about any price MS wants, because that guarenteed interoperability is of value to me, and I know they won't charge me more than I could afford." ...
... Until they simply decide it's in their (x-y-z) best interest to simply, say, raise the price of their products 100%! And they will always have a good (public) reason. In the back room, they're just interested in flooding the market with their SW and make sure it closes every other company. It's paranoid, I know... but if we're not careful, we'll end up with their knife up our throat, and we'll have nothing "else" to rely on... because we would have let them win, by not insisting on questionning the validity of their concern about SW development. IF we allow those companie$ (and not just M$), they can "buy" their way to monopoly and once established firmly, well... bye bye freedom of choice, see you in the next eon or two!
As stated in the article the battle is over the "Forms" market rather than the "document" market. Adobe has extended PDF so that you can fill them out as forms and is used in industry. The US government web sites are seeing an increasing number of these forms. However given their asinine policies like the fact that you require to buy their product to save filled forms, I gladly welcome any competition. Charging a client(content consumer) as opposed to the form producer (content producer) is a very bad idea. Hope Adobe wakes up in time....
So comparisons are being made between Adobe and Netscape. Let's compare apples to apples then.
Netscape was a program for working with HTML files. MSIE did the same thing for free. MSIE was NOT trying to introduce a new document standard, it was intended to render the same web pages that Netscape could render (yes, yes, I know they did mean and evil things that made being a webmaster shitty because of having to code for both platforms, but for the most part this is correct.)
Acrobat is a program for working with PDF files. OS X does the same thing for free. You an render a PDF from any application and view it using the "Preview" program.
In the sense of giving away what someone else is selling, Apple is to Adobe as MS was to Netscape. Netscape failed because they couldn't get revenue selling what the other guy was offering for free. But Apple isn't really a threat to Adobe because the Mac is such a small share of the market. Adobe must make the lion's share of their Acrobat Distiller revenues from Windows users.
MS won't be the threat to Adobe that they were to Netscape if their new product doesn't use the PDF format. This is more apples and oranges because PDF is already a very strong standard that will be hard to displace, and MS isn't just offering PDF manipulation software for free.
Nothing prevents anyone from writing another editing application (Adobe Acrobat is one already, but it's not free). The format is quite straightforward, but for some reason it's been seen as a companion to postscript and confined to the printing system. However, just because that's the way it has been, that's not the way it has to be.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
XBox
XDocs
OSX
Windoze Xp
Orafice Xp
XML
XFree86 and XWindows, X before X was cool....
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
They're our standard document retention format and pdf is sweet. It's also cross platform, so long as you have an Adobe pdf reader, and since Adobe should by this time be playing no favorites with MSFT (et to, Brute?) all major players (Win/X/OSX + PDA's) should have such ability, whereas Microsoft will probably only support Windows and OSX, so, what's the difference between XDOC and Word format? Loads in your browser? Only if it's got the plugin.
Besides, pdf is so well entrenched, xdoc will be the odd-man-out.
If these XDocs (can't resd artcile, slashdotted) load into Office automatically, all the better.
Ah, how I remember trying to integrate various document and drawing formats into Word. All the crashing, the swearing, how slow the PC slogged through these complex messes. Ok, I knew there had to be a reason the average Joe or Jane would need a 3 GHz P4/K7 on their desk.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
by 'take on' he meant assimilate/buy out/destroy.
which is all in the spirit of capitalism until you call it microsoft. then it becomes evil, right?
Microsoft has a history of battling cross-platform technologies. Previous examples include Netscape (with MSIE) and Java (with C#). The settlement did nothing to try to end these. This has been going on for years.
:-)
The solution is to ignore the new file format. If that doesn't work, adopt it (just like C#)
Watch out, or plain text will be the next to go
This is VERY misleading. Office/XDOCs are going to be competition to Browser/HTML-Forms as a UI-of-choice. They are a Micro$oft "standard" for WYSIWIG Forms for data input.
Think VB GUI forms on steroids, or Word Document Templates with LOTS of embedded VB controls - but all declaratively, rather than procedurally specified (i.e. no executable code).
And all WYSIWIG edited with the (extremely quirky and suboptimal, but VERY FAMILIAR TO THE AVERAGE USER) M$ Word Interface.
MS envision Document Interchange- e.g. order forms, PRINCE2 Project Management products etc. using their "look it it must be open, it's got magic XML pixie dust" XDocs format. (Rest assured the only viable implementation will be in MS Office)
Think about the way people work in the paper office world. They pass around lots of part-filled paper documents called "forms". People fill these out, and more people process them. Many companies rely on template Word documents and excel spreadsheets. Currently, they inflict VB Macros on the document to do stuff with the data entered, with XDocs, the Document becomes a "message" that can be passed to humans and threads alike for incremental processing.
XDocs means these forms can be pretty, while being electronically passed around and filled in, and the form entries progammatically sucked out, even if they're stuctured text themselves, with bolding and 20-point cursive fonts and so on.
PEOPLE LIKE PRETTY.
you must look at SVG, that's already
an W3C standard.
I've seen many persons here complain about
PDF complexity, but you must realize that PDF
it's not just about text, it's also about
vector graphics and bitmaps and it handles
rotations, scalling (matrix transformations),
and much more.
SVG it's like PDF, with the advantage that it's XML and hence it's easier to [programaticaly] edit.
And this is the sad state of the industry. Governments would rather not "mess" with the giant for fear of tech market problems. Is this not the time to do things? Since more control will mean more problems?
The result is that it is up to the people to take back control. Solution, spend as a little as possible to support MS. Remember MS is a company controlled by profits. Hurt them where it hurts them the most.
Use Linux... If not, then use Windows XP, but use Open Office or other compatible tools. Remember the goal here is not to entirely stop, but stop the gravy train. MS needs growth and if we take back control and stop that growth to status quo MS will have problems. They will have to raise prices and start gouging the consumer like they do with their enterprise licensing. And with time people will come to their own senses.
The key here is not to be complacent!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Using PDF on a Windows platform is a royal pain in the ass! I never thought about it because I was always thinking I was just unlucky that whenever I needed to open a PDF, the PC would not have Acrobat reader installed. This went on for many years.
Then I started using SuSe 8, and pretty much everywhere you go there is PDF this and PDF that. And with no dramatics. It just works.
Now I am switched to Mac, and PDF on OS X 10.2 works perfectly. It's one less thing I need to think of because I can count on it working every time. Print to PDF (Linux has it too) pretty much rocks.
How many times have you thought before downloading a PDF because you did not think it would be worth the hassle to try to open it?
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Didn't we all just read, a few weeks back about the following dumping MS Works for WordPerfect Office on consumer PC's?
Dell
HP/Compaq
Gateway
Sony
Seems slightly less onimous the more I think about this. All Adobe has to do to counter MS is jump into bed with Corel and make sure the above listed companies include the pdf viewer (Acrobat) on their PC's.
Even still, it seems like an against the current swim for MS.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I have to disagree with you there. I don't know if you're some kind of robot, but I do like to see data presented in a 'nice' way, as in, with (appropriate) colours, fonts, formatting, layout, etc. It's what gives presentations character. Without this, websites would hardly be recognisable from each other. Why do you think HTML and XML have formatting capabilities? Would the web be as easy to use, interpret, and understand if it was similar to Gopher? I don't think so. Formatting is good, and applies to most forms of presentation.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
How on earth can this compete with .pdf if it's not a cross-platform standard?!! The WHOLE point to .pdf is that it's universally available. This is just another Windows-only format.
How, exactly, will they do this? By using encrypted XSL? It seems to me that once they move from closed format binary files to standards based textual files it becomes easier to "crack" the format. Based on my cursory reading of the information available, I think XDoc is a good idea and represents a positive trend. All data should be xml-based these days, where feasible.
As for the PDF issue, last I knew PDF is a proprietary standard that costs money to license. I'm not sure why things like ps2pdf exist as free linux utilities, though I'm sure glad they do; I guess Adobe wants their formats to be world standards. Also, it's really easy to view PDF documents in a browser, and usually the plug-in is bundled; it's such a no-brainer to use that PDF as a de facto standard will likely remain so for years. The fact that Word doesn't have a (built in) Save As PDF doesn't seem to have slowed them down too much.
I suspect Adobe's bread and butter products are mainly Photoshop and, to a lesser extent, Pagemaker, PhotoDeluxe (which is usually a bundled freebie so they probably get about $10/copy), and their web design tools. They have little competition in the WinTel market for Photoshop and Pagemaker and they have a strong presense on the Mac side as well. I don't think Adobe's going away any time soon.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
That's kind of lame that a vague announcement of a new Microsoft product (Xdocs) which is only going to work in the new version of office (11) which will only work on Win2K or XP or the next version of Windows suddenly means that PDFs are going to whither away and die.
.doc readers for free in an attempt to turn ubiquitous .docs into .pdf killers. Anyone remember those doc (and .xls too) readers?
Nevermind the widespread usage of pdf files today. Where I work, we use PDF files to store contracts, and we'd just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in a huge project to automate the conversion of post script files into PDFs that are now accessable over the web. I can guarantee that there's no way we'd switch from PDF to Xdocs... at least not for another 5 years.
The analysts who made their remarks about Adobe should realize that MS tried this before (sort of) when they started distributing
it boggles the mind why MS wants to the swiss army knife of computing, jack of all trades-but master of none.
It seems like they try to get their hand in every single piece of pie.
I mean, you have OS, Office crap, media crap, hardware (they do actually make decent hardware), ISP, web server, database, app/web development, browser, games, etc etc.
They really do have too much money if they can afford to R&D every possible niche out there...
Instead of bickering about which of these two formats to use, stop and consider that you can write postscript without using any proprietary software. And you can view postscript on pretty much any platform you desire using ghostview.
So throw them *both* out, I say.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
No, PDF is just not an editing format. I'm not alking about read/write. Sure you _can_ edit it, but it's not a working document format. Working document formats carry semantic information like "this is a paragraph".
Why is it that everything has to be called something X or X something from Microsoft? It's sooo unimaginative! Let's see there's
DirectX
XBox
ActiveX
WindowsXP
and now XDoc.
XML isn't editable per si... it depends a lot on what you code inside it and how the info is managed inside...
Of course... is XML... but if it is something like:
76786786876678665349234
76785345345348665349234
76786783w24438665349234
7678678687667866534dfg4
Good luck decoding that... [if it meant anything at all in the beggining)...
It's XML, but it doesn't make any more sense then the majority of close formats!
Cheers...
Sure, OpenOffice does load faster on Windows if you have it's background process already running which already has all of the libs loaded into memory. Otherwise OpenOffice is about two times slower. In both cases OpenOffice eats considerably more RAM. What a piece of shit.
In a more ideal future, all presentation issues will be decided on the client side. You send me the data, and I've configured my software to present it the way I prefer. It won't happen for a while yet, but I can dream. And the continued use of PDF blocks this dream.
I think you have a good point, but there are other reasons to use fonts and colors besides besides deception - there is the simple matter of self-expression. Your argument taken to its logical conclusion will apply equally to HTML as well - but there are legions of people who hand-craft web pages with a carefully chosen look and feel. The same thing is true with companies, for example Google's beautifully spare page compared to some others. This subconscious communication can be very powerful. I sympathize about the PowerPoint engineers, but its still really the fault of the people who are listening and simply are unwilling to seriously analyze words despite a glitzy window dressing. Despite the fact it has the most attractive front page, I would not use Google if I didn't think it was the best search engine.
and you'll get good reasons why Excel is better. Excel's Solver module alone (even with its problems) kicks the butt of anything Lotus or OpenOffice Calc will do for you in the area of analysis.
XML isn't editable per si... it depends a lot on what you code inside it and how the info is managed inside...
t ;t ;t ;t ;
Of course... is XML... but if it is something like:
<asadfewrewr>
<asdawedawd>76786786876678665349234</asdawedawd&g
<asdawedawd>76785345345348665349234</asdawedawd&g
<asdawedawd>76786783w24438665349234</asdawedawd&g
<asdawedawd>7678678687667866534dfg4</asdawedawd&g
</asadfewrewr>
Good luck decoding that... [if it meant anything at all in the beggining)...
It's XML, but it doesn't make any more sense then the majority of close formats!
Cheers...
I'm curious as to HOW this would be implemented?
Are you saying that MS will put some code in their corresponding "read_file()" function that goes like:
if ( file.name.endsWith("pdf") || file_analyzer.matches(file, PDF_FORMAT) )
play_crappy_Flash_Metallica_Animation("PDF BAAD!")
Wouldn't that be a bit too much, running this for each file read?
I mean, as far as I know MS doesn't "support" PDF any more than it supports any other file format because, well, it's a FILE FORMAT.
Like Java, people still have to download an application (Adobe Acrobat) in order to read and use the files. Unlike Java, the lack of initial "default support" means that people understand that concept, download Acrobat and that's it. Acrobat then handles whatever "support" is needed.
Printed-doc file formats? Isn't this handled by the printer driver, such as a print-to-PDF-driver?
Surely MS doesn't want to take full responsability of hardware drivers these days, even if they're just printers! Or am I misreading the term?
Completely undercutting PDF would be, as you say, analogous to completely undercutting Navigator, and almost as unfeasible. It would require specifically engineering the OS to check every file (document or executable on each case), analyze it (is it PDF, or is it Navigator?) and sabotage it.
They would need a better excuse these days than they had for DR DOS, because they would be more suspect, it would be MUCH more obvious, it would affect negatively their clients more directly, it would be technically more expensive (check every file, not the running environment) and they have the money and resources to take the market in another way.
It would be like playing that trick against Harvard Graphics or Lotus back then, a bit too high-profile...
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Exactly... This is the entire purpose of PDF. Having been "locked down" you can take that PDF file down to your local service bureau, print shop, publisher, graphic designer or whatever and have a good possibility that what you pick up at the end of the day matches the file you submitted in the first place.
I think that XML and PDF make the perfect complementary technologies. Store your data in XML where it can be retargeted for a million purposes. When you need to get a final product out the door, create a PDF and lock down your design.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
What I want to know is whether this will the Microsoft XDoc be ADA 508 compliant. Right now, we have had several serious discussions with Adobe and they have not been able to fully implement ADA 508 compliance (complex tables with multiple headers). We are very disappointed and have begun converting PDFs to HTML however it is VERY time consumming.
"Due to a surge in demand following listing on Slashdot, our database has melted. Highly trained monkeys are working flat out to fix this and get the site up and running again"
I fully agree. What is difficult to understand is why PS didn't become the defacto standard for a doc sharing format instead of PDF: It is open, it is as good as PDF for doing what you said, and was available probably 10 years ago (and even implemented in different hardware, like computers and lasers printers).
that Word will finally get back "Reveal Codes" in some form or another?
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
sounds very much like Xwindows. i might get confused. many people might be confused. SUE THEM SUE THEM ALL!
A few things here.
First off, if anyone has any doubts of MS attempts to dominate EVERY aspect of personal computing, here's your proof.
If Adobe and the PDF format disappear then I think it should be pretty clear to all MS's monopolist status.
The fact that Adobe stock tumbles, should tell you something about the monopoly power of MS. If they plan to introduce a competing product, the other company's stock falls...just because MS enters the fray? I guess these observers believe that once MS enters a market, all others are doomed...(again MS = monopolistic competition).
Pathetic. There are few GOOD PC products anymore, just MS products.
K.
> it's been seen as a companion to postscript
Exactly, in fact PDF and Postscript are very similar. When you render text to PS, you can end up with low-level drawing primitives such as lines and curves defining each letter, rather than high-level instructions such as "draw this string at position x,y". Once you've done that, recovering the original text amounts to highly sophisticated shape recognition and is impossible for all practical purposes. Precisely because PS and PDF support so many rendering mechanisms they are unsuitable as editable document formats.
When you open a file into an MS Office app, on the other hand, all bets are off. Fonts, margins, colours, line weights, even element positions, are liable to change *undetectably*. If you're using anything other than the *exact* same version that it was originally created in, with the same fonts installed and the same templates on your machine, it's even worse.
You're almost 100% correct.
You forgot printer.. if you have a different printer than the original creators (or, if you *are* the original creator, and change printers) the document changes, without notifying you.
"You send me the data, and I've configured my software to present it the way I prefer"
I don't think that approach is very smart. When I read something, I better have the optimum learning / content transfer scenario. As, by definition, in most of the cases you don't know what you will be reading when you read it, you cannot decide on the optimum layout for you to understand or learn the information that someone is presenting to you. On the other hand, that someone knows well that information, to the point that he or she has (even) written it.
I for one prefer the formatting and that done by the other part and just choose the nice-to-me, not-confusing-to-me documents. And when I write things, I try to make them look nice (to make the particular content easy to understand).
An easy example: Let's say that I draw a circuit diagram. Most of them fit better landscape but it just happens that mine fits better portrait. So I format the sheet to be portrait. Then your configuration changes that to landscape because that's the way you LIKE your schematics. As a consequence, you get crap for not relying on the author criterion. No, that's not very smart..
If the law says using the XDoc specification is illeagal without purchasing a license then MS owns your data and it is irrelevant wether the data format is human-readable or easily parsable. MS is making the format less obscured because they have made using the format illegal without licensing.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
In fact, one of the guiding principles of the XML standards board is that a first year computer science student should be able to write a XML parser in about a week.
After parsing, it's just a matter of knowing what the tags are. Which yes, are 'propriety' in the sense that anyone can define their own tags. But it's not like you can hide them. I'd say the open source community would be able to import the files in about 3 days, if that, and generate them in 7.
Is there a PDF license fee? I don't think so -- It's supposed to be an open format.
And, after diggout out the 500-page PDF1.3 spec (some interesting reading -- PDF is a cool format.), (Pages 15 and 16, too, by the way.) yes, indeed, you can pretty much implement it in anything you want to read or write PDF's, as long as you include an appropriate Adobe-indicating copyright notice.
So, MS could implement PDF if it really wanted to.
Although, now, in the crazy days of XML, and as PDF is sort of, well, old, maybe xDocs is something better.
Mind you, if it's not free and open, nobody will use it.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Furthermore, When I distribute .pdf files to people around my campus (I'm involved in a couple student groups) I invariably find someone without Acrobat Reader, and I then must explain how to download and install it. And while most people use computers vastly overpowered for their needs, they rarely understand the idea of document files. One guy asked why "Word can't open it." So if Microsoft releases a .pdf killer that comes standard on Windows computer and a free program to make it backwards compatible, I can see Adobe being shoved out of the market in a hurry.
It may not be a popular opinion but it's true. Yeah, I'm not a huge Microsoft fan either, and this will be abusing their monopoly power, but it will also make life easier for many people. I don't include myself in that group of people since I primarily use Lotus WordPro and PageMaker.
And therefore won't be accepted by the printing industry. PDF IS PostScript (just ripped to the screen) and outputs properly to most imagesetters.
Anybody who knows anything will tell you that printers hate to receive anything built in a Microsoft program.
Opera 6 is a VERY nice browser with features that win over every other browser out there. For the few sites that don't play nice with Opera, keep a copy of Mozilla (or Phoenix) on your drive. Perfect; no legions of popups, drive-by downloads, potential root-level CSS hacks, blah blah blah... And it's all free, although I did choose to pay $39 for Opera. I believe it is well worth the price.
More importantly...did you get a job from all those PDF applications or did no one complain because they didn't call you back? :-)
Does anyone else think there could be an argument made that calling MS Office "productive software" might be stretching things a bit?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Since Adobe itself is heavily into SVG, it (SVG) is positioned to become the leading display document format. This is, in some ways, ironic, because most people think of SVG as an image format.
Consider:
FUD, FUD and more FUD, only on Slashdot!
Microsoft released XDR because XSD was not ready and DTD's suck. You will find their latest parser almost fully supports the XSD format. And it is "almost" because XSD was just recently finished. I don't know of any parser out there that is fully compliant yet. I would bet anyone that when XDoc's come out, the schema for them will be in XSD.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Wow! Another virus vector!!! Who said innovative technology is dull???
I saw XDocs for the first time 3 months ago in Alpha. It's a generalized form-filling and routing app with a pretty pure XML back end. It's not obvious to me why it should replace either ordinary Web apps or VB apps, but then I'm not a MSFT product manager.
/. is suposed to be technically competent.
PDF?!?!? get real. PDF stands for "Print the Damn File", it's reasonably-portable electronic paper. Adobe in their dreams would like to turn it into a forms package but they've never got close to first base.
A bit of basic fact-checking in future,
I think this is just a bit of an over reaction. MS is a little late in this area. PDF is very well established as a standard. Adobe and the rest of the world are much more cognizant of how MS handles competition. They will b much more prepared then netscape was. Finally, they also have the US legal system to deal with. PDF is the legal standard for e-filing of cases and motions. The entire US legal system from parking tickets to antitrust filings, if filied electronicaly is filied using PDF,TIFF and a touch of XML. I develop products in this area, and it is hard enough to get these folks online, much less change their minds to use yet another standard. Last week I had a discussion with various courts about how to get just this kind of stuff onto microfilm. The courts won't move, and the businesses will stay close to what the courts use for official documents. I really don't think PDF is going anywhere. Through in XML-FO and FOP and things get even more firm.
-jj-
Right now we are in the midst of the marketng blitz that Microsot warned of during the summer. Aside from marketing and lobbying, Microsoft has been putting it's money and effort into illegally maintaining a monopoly. At the end of the day, when the dust clears, it still amounts to having fallen behind in technology. Simply put, their products can't compete on technical merits which leaves using the monopoly as a hammer.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You're forgetting multiplatform support. PDF is available on anything from windows to linux, mac, and even palm devices. I have the feeling that whatever MS makes will not be as pervasive...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I think people are making a major mistake of thinking that XDocs is essentially a Microsoft-only format.
.PDF files. In short, when you create an XML-formatted document or form in StarOffice or OpenOffice it can be read and modified in Office 11 using XDocs controls.
People forget that XDocs IS essentially Microsoft's name for an XML-formatted document. Because XDocs is based on XML, anyone who can read and modify XML documents should (in general) be able to use XDocs documents and forms without having to use Microsoft software.
Given that non-Microsoft operating systems (Linux, BSD variants including MacOS X, commercial UNIX variants, etc.) are incorporating XML support anyway, the XDocs format is actually a good idea since users won't need to install additional software to read and modify XDocs documents and forms like you have to do with Adobe
In the current economy, jobs are few and applications are heading for 'divide-by-number-of-jobs'.
If I get over 300 applicatiins, and I can't read one of them, I don't complain - I delete it.
XDocs' potential is not as a PDF killer, but that's the way it could go. The reason MS is using XML is to make it easier for users to exchange data. One user could create an Access database with it and then send it to a user that doesn't have Access. This user could open it up in Excel or Word without doing anything. Right now the sender or receiver would have to do some type of conversion in order to use the data.
One poster correctly observed that to many users _WORD_ is the computer. XDocs makes users more depenent on Microsoft. Now it'll be easier to share spreadsheets, databases, and other documents... they can do it with one program not several.
Let me guess, IE7 will include built in support for them.
So, what? Yes, Microsoft is trying to create and support a new format. However, they aren't cancelling support for PDF, because they never supported it in the first place.
Acrobat Reader has always been a plugin for Windows browsers and I'm sure it will continue to be long after this amazing new format is gone.
Adobe gets screwed. Good. It couldn't happen to a more despicable company. The entire Adobe board of directors and their dimwitted attorneys deserve to be bent over Billy-boy's desk and deeply penetrated sans lubricants.
No, I don't like them. Did I fail to make that point clear?
I'm a Web developer, and the vacillating ways IE has handled links to Office documents have caused our department no end of headaches over the last three versions of IE we've used on our corporate WAN. We're wedded to framesets for some purposes, and IE and Office can't seem to work together.
They open Office docs inside framesets, with the app in the background, like Acrobat -- and printing is screwed up and users can't save the documents. They open a separate IE window with each Office document, including menu options that are sort of half-enabled, not allowing users to use obvious features. They give up on the IE-for-Office-docs idea altogether, opening separate Office app windows for each document, and it works... but it kind of makes one wonder whether they could have figured out that frameset thing to start with, rather than slowly lurching toward the workaround we'd already resorted to for their first hacked implementation.
Print to file from Excel 2000 sometime, and see if you get a Windows API save dialog. See if it looks like the same thing in Word, for example. Um, no.
More integrated over time? Seems to me like the MS departments for Word and Excel are warring factions, leave alone IE.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
You seems surprised that "importing" an Excel workbook into Excel went faster and with less problems than importing the same workbook into other programs. Why not import a sxm file into Excel for comparision?
Yes, you are correct. We look at everything that Microsoft does with great skepticism.
Do you really think that Microsoft won on Friday? They were CONVICTED OF ANTITRUST.
Ah, but in the la la land of microsoft because they somehow bought off the judge, they win.
It is sickening.
Didn't Balmer say that free software is killing software?
So why does microsoft keep adding these 'free' features?
Obviously if microsoft includes something for 'free' they have an ulterior motive. And all of us who were put out of work by the Redmond Mafia know this.
Or why don't they give office for free?
Or why don't they give server for free?
Or why don't they give the dotnet framework for free?
We don't trust them, they are untrustworthy.
Did you forget that they are GUILTY OF ANTITRUST violations.
How can you turn a lenient sentence into a victory? They are GUILTY.
We use their products because we have to use them. We are forced to because they are pretty much the only show in town.
Would you not use water at your house, or electricity, because they are provided by a monopoly?
Can you imagine how it feels to be a top software engineer but because money mongering lawyers and venture capitalists decide that MS is the top dog, we are all out of work?
We know what MS did to get where they are.
It started with bloated DOS code that they used to limit the use of memory in the 640K DOS PC. They had all of their secret 'Bios' and OS calls. Noone could compete.
If you aren't on their payroll, then you are a fool. If you are on their payroll you are dishonest.
Read Psalm 37.
PEACE
aka a secretary . oh wait you know VB, you must be an engineer.
With reason, though. Of all the companies they've taken on, I can't think of any flat-out LOSSES for MS. Netscape - DEAD. Dr. DOS - DEAD. Niedermayer - DEAD! (Sorry, couldn't resist). Their worst "losses" are semi-stalemates where they gradually erode market share (realmedia, Sun, AOL, and maybe, though WAY too early to call...apache?). So I wouldn't feel too good about my Adobe stock, maybe. Of course, I don't see them going after Photoshop.
I love MS's business model:
1. establish monopoly.
2. Target competitor.
3. Devise MS version of competitor's product - similar but incompatible.
4. Integrate into Windows and distribute for free.
5. Prevent computer manufacturers from including competitor's product.
6. Watch company die.
7. Get sued.
8. String out suit until you win or until suit is no longer relevant.
9. 2 days later...GOTO 2.
I mean, they could at least have waited a week after the CKK decision!
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Sorry, but you're wrong. They are editable, to an extent. With Pit Stop or Quite Imposing, you can make all kinds of changes. By "importing" the .pdf into Photoshop, you can make many other types of changes.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
A lot of printing companies have switched to a PDF workflow; there's a whole industry built around plugins and RIPs built to handle Acrobat files.
If that's not enough, check out the AP's ad submission process. Yep, PDF.
http://www.adsend.com/infopages/public/howitworks. htm
Ask yourself this: did MS Publisher kill Adobe inDesign? Nope, it was laughed at.
Microsoft keeps people like me in business, because I can charge big bucks to Best Buy Bob who picked up some beige box and MS Publisher to do his company newsletter and "save a few dollars."
Double you earning potential with a Document Engineering degree at DeVry. Learn the tricks of complex word processing applications. The benefits of PDF. Design your own fonts. Impress your boss with macros, a complex programming technique for changing the color of fonts.
Don't settle for being a low paid technical writer or an out of work HTML Guru.
If you look at Adobe's stock over the past 3 months, it's been increasing steadily from about 16 USD to 27 USD. See it here.
Why run around screaming that the sky is falling?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Is it just me or do most people in marketing think they can slap a x before something to make it cool? xDocs, xBox, It's all a big pile of crap. For a while, things became i and e as well. Yes, Apple has the emac (education macintosh) and the imac (internet macintosh) but it's ok, altough this is semi annoying, Apple has other flaws you can rant on about.
any market guy in the world will tell you that better merketing (or better business strategu)trumps better technology. Thats why youre a geek. being a MS fanboy makes you a dumb geek, which is ReaLly rock bottom.
PDF isn't a very good format either because Adobe controls the spec. It isn't open.
Yes, this is why it isn't documented anywhere. You certainly can't create your own free PDF creation utility or anything.
Plz look around b4 u make assumptions.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"MS will embrace Adobe's PDF idea, extend it using XDocs, and then let Adobe's PDF wither as Office defaults to output XDoc instead of PDF"
Since when does Office output PDF files by default? Office only will output PDF files if you spend several hundred dollars on Acrobat. When you print to PDF, you either click a little icon or click File->print PDF. There is absolutely no way MS could stop or influence that. Unless when people try to print PDF files MS hijacks the Adobe buttons and makes them print Xdocs instead. That would have them in a losing court battle with Abode instantly as what MS would have done is break Acrobat on purpose. Adobe actually has the money to defend itself.
The other thing is for this to take off everyone needs to be running Office 11 which isn't going to happen for quite some time. There are a ton of Office 97/2000/XP installs out there. So really just like Acrobat most people would have to download some sort of addon program to read Xdocs correctly since they won't have Office11. Also most people won't even have the ability to make Xdocs.
So although I wouldn't bet against MS, I'm not so sure PDF is going to be dying anytime soon.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
that adobe will finally start porting a bunch of their stuff to Linux. When software companies are on top, they do not want to change a thing.That means not pissing off MS, so no port. Unfortunatly, that also means that you are potenential MS target iff your revenue is still growing.
Novell is a good example of a company who is dead. Likewise, my money is that inuit will figure it out in about 2 years that turbo tax is suddenly killed from above. From a friend of mine working at MS, I am told that they are actively gunning for sap by hopeing to kill the small ones such as jdedwards, people soft, etc.
It is the same strategy that they have been using in the DBMS world (smart, btw).
10. Xdoc will be bundled in such a way as to make it unattractive
9. Reduced ability to get rid of M$ in the future (when their business practices get even worse)
8. Products that are not readily cloned will not be widely adopted
7. Customer perception that M$ == Non-standard
6. M$ has tried this before and failed; report snapshot (.snp) files not very popular
5. Backwards compatibility with obsolete IE versions
4. Free "Print to PDF" already possible via print redirector + ghostscript
3. Lack of deployment from customers who have frozen M$ installs due to "software assurance"
2. M$ would have to release a Linux Xdoc reader
1. "File...Properties" would still reveal the identities of people who pretend to be regular customers but who are in fact PR writers.
the court system will fix it
they will make sure that mikey plays nice
er um, well..........maybe
er um, well..........they should
er um, well..........nvm
Linux Format reports on a new Microsoft PDF-killer technology to be included in Office 11, called XDocs.
Why doesn't Microsoft avoid the confusion of a plethora of names with "X" in them and just start calling all of their products "X". Everyone should. "X reports on a new X X-killer technology to be included in X, called X." Of course, it will never run on X.
Now that they got therr token slap on the wrist, we will see a microsoft that we couldnt even imagine, gobbling up everything in their path.
Final goal, total world domination of all technology.
With little or no recourse by anyone, now that the Goverment gave them a virtual 'green light'..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Two points about your lofty principals:
.DOC.
1) HR is full of low-paid elevated secrataries, and that generally is not reflective of the company as a whole. Odds are they've neve heard of Acrobat, and after that whole ILOVEYOU incident they've been very careful not to open strange filetypes anyway.
2) Headhunters have a particular workflow -- copy your resume into their MS Word template with their name and phone number on it. That's important to them because you are worth a very large commission (~20% of yearly pay) if hired.
If they send your resume 'bare', there's a very high probablilty that the company will "forget" who sent it and hire direct. Not delivering them a MS Word resume just might require them to retype your resume in Word (I've seen this).
3) MS Word files can be generated for free by renaming any HTML file to
4) Once you get hired, there's very high odds that you will be expected to produce lots of DOC files, so what's the point?
Good luck getting a job - I guess it's going to come down to how much someone needs you versus someone who isn't a pain in their ass.
"Please, please, oh wonderful Microsoft, please include every possible scripting and macro support in XDocs, and please, please have them all active by default at install, and please, please tie them into every other scripting/macro system in your wonderful universe of OSes/bundled apps with as little control on malware as possible."
Finally! Microsoft is going to do exactly what I ask it to!
It's a free market place. The better technology will win, and not the company that is bigger. Microsoft has a history of improving current technology and bringing innovative products to the market.
Billy
Come on people, Apple is now so firmly behind PDF that it's not going anywhere at akk soon. Maybe MS is trying to unify it's imaging architecture, who knows...
My experience with OS X (10.2) is that Apple's Preview.app is lean but not fast - clicking through pages is slow as render times take much longer than Acrobat Reader 5.05. The thumbnails are nice, but seem to slow Preview down further. Ironic, because in OS 9.x I prefer Acrobat Reader 4 because 5.x is much slower than 4.
can I run xdocs on my xbox?
... fix it!
--- B. Gates.
Am I the only person who absolutely hates PDF's? A proprietary format where you
1) have to buy a piece of software that costs hundreds of dollars to be able to produce these documents (what else does that remind me of?)
2) where the documents get positively huge (one of our clients insists on building pdf documents instead of html/php docs because of "better graphical formatting" - never mind that a single one is 700Kb - who's going to sit through downloading that???)
3) where the documents' compression is so varied... you compress, you can't insert stuff into the doc anymore with scripts, you don't compress, you end up with a 2Tb doc.
Ridiculous. Hope MS takes them to the cleaners. I hate fucking Adobe PDF.
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
Microsoft already ignored the exsistance of PDF before by creating their own .PDF files (Package Definition Files (now SMS)). As if they hadn't noticed the the Adobe PDF-files (that were around for ages already).
I guess they will surrender again this time.
. . . to compete by announcing vaporware. But I have mixed feelings about this, because anything that helps the stock price of the DMCA wielding jackbooted thugs at Adobe fall is good in my book.
Hey, its not like PDF is the only thing adobe has going for them.
It would be something different if MS-XPaint was coming out. MS couldn't even shake a stick at what adobe has going for them with graphics. Adobe has established PDF (It works and is the medium of today) so why would people switch to MS Xdocs.
Quality over Quantity.http://www.virusgaming.com/
this promises to be interesting... if people do start to use it in the Windows world, there's bound to be no support for platforms such as linux, bsd, etc. so when some hacker gets frustrated that he can't read this xdoc format, he'll reverse engineer it, m$ claims that copyrights were violated, and BAM lawsuit.
this lawsuit then in turn gives the opensource community a bad rep because they "infringe" on other peoples property rights. Then microsoft will release the old explorer code (since they have there new browser) so that microsoft looks like it's beginning to see the light. Microsoft looks good to the public, their lawsuits and court troubles are forgotten because they don't seem to be monopolizing anymore (giving away source and all) and their name is cleared. or so it seems....
I write code.
We've gotta keep an eye on this one - remember out .bmp killed .gif and .jpg?
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
...reasons why part of the DoJ agreement should of prevented MS from pre-announcing any product just as they had previously done with IBM. Part of that agreement should of been a huge* fine for evey day missed from it's announced availability. Furthermore, they should not be allowed to announce any product further out than a maximum of 60-days from product availability.
(*) Something on the order of several million dollars per day. The point being is that it should be significant enough to prevent the fine from being just another cost of doing business.
Many of the Adobe apps are "the reason" why people can't convert to Linux.
I don't think anyone on this forum who is worrying about microsoft 'subverting' xml has any concept of what XML is. You can no more subvert xml than you can subvert text files. Will they use a weird schema? Maybe. But who cares? That's perfectly allowable in xml. XML is a subset of SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language - a language that allows you to specify any vocabulary you want.
This is XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<movie>
<movieName>We Were Soldiers</movieName>
<movieNote href="http://www.hollywood.com">Vietnam movie staring Mel Gibson</movieNote>
<movieType>Action</movieType>
<movieId>99</movieId>
<show>
<showNo>1</showNo>
<showDate>3-1-2002</showDate>
<showTime>21.00</showTime>
<freeseats>10</freeseats>
</show>
</movie>
How the heck would you subvert that? It's plain text with markup tags that denote logical sections. That's all xml is....
Adobe owns the market for easy viewing, cross-platform files. Their viewer is free and comes with all of their products, and is the industry standard for help documents on disks.
Mircosoft will be starting anew with no users, and only people who purchase Office 11 will be able to create XDocs files, so it will be slow to catch on anyway. Because this is a relatively new field for M$, they probably won't have the best execution of making these files anyway...we all know how crappy they are at making good user interfaces anyway! (With new programs, that is.)
I don't know what the adoption rate will be but it is an open alternative for printed docs. It is not a replacement for css as it is a PDL, not a style language.
Does anyone know if xdocs is XFO-based?
The Rothschilds did not take over England. It was the Freemasons and the Rosicrusians.
XML already includes all the subversion you need - the CDATA tag, that lets you insert binary blobs in an XML document. A file can be just one giant CDATA tag with a whole Word document held inside, and it's still valid XML... and not very open.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The publishing industry is moving to the PDF/X standards. Check some of the PDF workflow systems from Agfa, Heidelberg, and other big-name publishing vendors. A look at the DDAP is a good idea too.
Time Magazine annouced this year ALL ads should be submitted as PDF/X files. That is a big corporation for MS to go up against. Ads submitted through the AP's AdSend system to newspapers must be in PDF format. The web use of PDF is a small part of how the format is used.
First off, Adobe isn't the only nor the best publisher of PDF creation software.
There is competition, including Global Graphics, who are responsible for the Harlequin RIP engine, which is one of the most-respected high-end Postscript rasterizers on the market.
Secondly, PDF is now the standard for commercial printing. Used to be Postscript (and there are still presses that want to run PDF through Quark to get PS for their RIP, as fucked-up an idea as that is), but PDF has made great strides the past couple years.
Microsoft will NOT be pushing PDF out of the commercial press market.
Finally, PDF is the standard for non-interactive, cross-platform web-accessed information. Nothing from Microsoft will be bumping that.
In short, much fuss about nothing. Buy Adobe stock while it's down.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Mind you, if it's not free and open, nobody will use it.
Yeah, 'cause no one ever uses things like the increasingly obfuscated MSWord formats. 'Cause they're not free and open. I can't remember the last time some idiot sent me a proprietary Word-format document. Nope. Never happens.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Remember skylarov!
All these companies, like Adobe and others buy into the MS-dominated market, then when MS turns on them, they evaporate.
I remember having a long discussion with a guy from PointCast years ago (remember them?) arguing with him about their decision to drop support for Mac OS because they wanted to focus on windows. I told him to look for another job because they would be out of business shortly. MS came out with 'channels' that never really caught on but it was enough to blow companies like POintCast out of teh water.
Adobe is/was basically going down the same road. But developing for Windows primarily, then being VERY late on OS X versions of thier software, they continue to MS process and endgame.
Another great example is companies like Cisco and these other network equipment gear manufacturers. They come out with drivers and admin tools only in windows. I had to laugh when I saw a full-page add for MS networking equipment (hardware) in the WSJ. All the network equipment companies should be gone here soon too.
Companies need to start to see they are just furnishing rooms in a house in which someone else controls the floor, ceiling and walls and it is just a matter of time before all of them cave in on them once they become unnecessary to MS.
Wasn't everyone just complaining about the Microsoft Monopoly and how it was bad for competition?
/.
Doesn't Adobe have a (relative) monopoly on PDF as they are the largest player in the space?
Therefore, this is a *GOOD* thing, except possibly on
There are very few real things in this world...this isn't one of them.
Microsoft: Take this document, but beware! It's a proprietary format!
Slashdot: That's bad.
Microsoft: But it's XML compliant!
Slashdot: That's good.
Microsoft: The DTD is also proprietary.
Slashdot: That's bad.
Microsoft: But you can reverse-engineer and write your own parser.
Slashdot: That's good.
Microsoft: The parser will have to be written in perl.
(blank stare)
Microsoft: That's bad.
Slashdot: Can I go now?
--Dan
Great. The best thing that could happen to the web is have PDF go away entirely. It totally circumvents html, is bandwidth intensive, and decidedly not ada friendly. The only reason it has succeeded is because it is so easy. You're totally at the mercy of the author unless you buy the writer kit. Of course, the reader is free--just like MSIE. Hmmmm. PDF and DMCA go hand in hand, as Adobe's behavior in the courts over the last year has proven.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Mind you, if it's not free and open, nobody will use it. Why is everybody using the MS-Office formats then?
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
Wait, let's do the whole she-bang!i ne-Warner
AOL-TimeWarner-Netscape-Adobe-HBO-NewL
I bet I missed some.
To all Slashdick moderators: Please lick the precum off the tip of my shriveled, flaccid 132 year-old wang. Thanks
Love,
Bitter Old Man
And that's Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark Xpress, Pagemaker, Freehand, etceteras. The world does not revolve around office.
.rtf a long, long time ago. The worst that can happen here is that PDF gets whacked in the windows corporate arena- where most of the users know as much about their options as a slug knows about quantum mechanics.
:P)
Also the fact that the Acrobat Reader is available for just about EVERY operating environment. OSses that have never run Microsoft code.
PDF is where it is because it's a standard- and most importantly, it's supported by Illustrator and Photoshop- the de-facto vector and pixel manipulation standards.
I'll admit, I use Word- but I moved over to
One more reason I'm glad I have no use for windows- in the circles I move, it's becoming progressively marginalized. I'm in a fortunate position of being able to enforce standards compliance at work- and in our case, "standard" happens to be "supported by the widest array of platforms". (coincidentally how I piss my supervisor off- he can't get the concept of video codecs through his skull and keeps rendering roughs in intel codecs.
I don't see an XDoc reader happening for Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, Irix, Linux, MacOSX, Be, and OS/2.
Hence, I don't see a use for it.
- Bitter Old Man
This explains all the nasty problems and issues that Internet Explorer has bringing up .pdfs, especially served up dynamically. Microsoft has been deliberately breaking the Acrobat Reader / Internet Explorer integration. This reminds me of the Wordperfect fiasco. In this case they have started sabotaging the competing product long before theirs exists. I think Adobe should start getting a lawsuit ready.
quick howto for a drag and drop pdf server in a windows environment... http://www.rrust.com/linuxpdfserver_howto.html
(arg, the super-slow WestCoast slashdot server has apparently eaten some of my post, and mis-formatted the rest.)
I was mainly referring to textual documents. The cases of diagrams, schematics, and maps are obvious examples of some layout control being necessary. However,
When I read something, I better have the optimum learning / content transfer scenario.
In the majority of today's printed communication (going by quantity of paper here), there is an adverserial relationship between author and reader. The publishers of newspapers and junk mail are trying to get me to read and respond to advertising, while overlooking shortcomings in their articles/claims. They cannot be trusted to present information in the most suitable way.
Neither can electronic publishers- PDF writers behave the same way paper-users do, and HTML authors are in a constant battle with client-side reformatting software to stuff more and more advertising windows onto my screen.
Their main motive is advertising- which has expanded far beyond its roots of "informing potential customers of our services", into "subconciously training customers to prefer our product for reasons unrelated to its merits, often to their own detriment"
If, however, these publishers know that the information will be reformatted by my own software, and that they can't do anything about it, then we'll see an increase in communications honesty: they'll no longer be encouraged to trick you into paying attention to ads. And they'll be forced into a more straightforward "pay-to-read" business model, rather than the vague "this article brought to you by the fuzzy chance that you'll like it and form a more positive association with Pepsi than with Coca-Cola".
(I know, you don't have to tell me, the technology for effective nanopayments doesn't yet exist. I told you, I'm being idealist here! Advertising is obviously costing the consumers some money in the form of increased expenses, or else companies wouldn't be able to cover their ad costs, not to mention profit by them. It would be nicer all around if that money could go to be paid from the author to the reader, without an advertiser getting in the way.)
An easy example: Let's say that I draw a circuit diagram. Most of them fit better landscape but it just happens that mine fits better portrait.
You think there's only 2 kinds of paper layout? My printer has 14 inch pages. So I guess I'm stuck at the author's whim for portrait, and can't print it all.
The example of a circuit diagram looking better in landscape or portait doesn't even make sense. (Its just whether or not the numbers on the transistors are rotated 90 degrees, the image has no necessary top or bottom).
A fallacy in your argument that "only the author knows the best format for his data" is that it begs the question that there even IS one best format. In the digital age, there should be multiple valid views of information, dynamically reformatted from moment-to-moment according to the needs of the viewer.
Publishing a diagram or schematic in a display language robs me of the potential benefits of reading it on my computer. If you'd given my a copy of the application-level data from your engineering program, I could print it out on my giant size plotter. I could aggregate complex sections into single block diagrams, I could link it with other related circuits. I could load it into SPICE to see how it actually runs. I could mouseover an IC and see highlights on the 18 other components it's linked to. All these cool possibilities of really exploiting the power of computers, held back because people cling to the old habits of paper-based publishing.
True, today its not likely that the application you used it widely enough distributed for that to be possible. But that can be circumvented- for instance, the application file format could contain a URL for some plugin viewers (including one in java) to convert the data to a printable form if I don't have the original program. This should be transparent to most people who just want to view the document (same way that Microsoft Mediaplayer(tm) downloads new codecs) Or if I do have that program, or a compatible one, then I can use its full power to explore the data from many viewpoints.
As a consequence, you get crap for not relying on the author criterion. No, that's not very smart..
If I got a bad printout because
I blindly apply an overbroad format, that's my fault. As my fault, and I can fix it and view it again (and, preferring to read from the screen, probably without wasting paper). But if the author made a mistake, I have no opportunity to
correct it myself. In my own experience, however, PDF authors often send out unreadable messes because they LIKE distressed handwriting fonts and they LIKE 3 center justified columns of 6 point all-lowercase Arial. People get these elaborate text-formatting tools, and then feel a constant urge to use them, regardless of consequences.
The use of PDF or similar file-formats means that I don't have the freedom to correct the author's mistakes and oversights. (It is somewhat possible to extract the text from a PDF file, but Adobe discourages this,
making the needed tools either expensive or laborious to operate).
Even though he might be a good writer, I'm stuck with his bad page-layout choices, and can't enjoy the work. Most people don't have the skill for good graphical design, lets not force their bad/non choices on everyone else.
Like Free Soft
ware says, more power to the end-user! Separate content from presentation! Viva la libre!
The question is, how would M$ take on pdf when it's so hard to be available on as many platforms? Does anyone see Sun or alot of the linux distros supporting a proprietary M$ format?
Check THIS out...
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
What happens when a company like "Microshaft" announces something so drastic in the software industry that it causes another huge software competitor to lose an immence percentage of their company volume. Then "Microshaft" decides they have enough money and inhales that company because they need a new product. In this case they planed an industry senerior that had absolutely no intention of producing a product, but rather to give themselves a better chance at purchasing their new next best product.
PDF, and Adobe, aren't going anywhere. Nice try Microsoft. Mark this as another failed venture with X-Box and .NET.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
4) Once you get hired, there's very high odds that you will be expected to produce lots of DOC files, so what's the point?
...whatever makes you feel better, I guess, but you should at least learn to spell ``principle'' before telling people they should disregard them.
I have never in my life been required (or even expected) to produce a word document. Throughout my entire career I've been told that I will someday have to use Windows for my job. I have not yet.
I was a systems adminstrator for years, and now I'm a developer. I'm expected to write java, python, c, etc... I produce documentation in either html or pdf (via pdflatex or ghostscript from generated files) and nobody complains.
I may choose to work with criminals, but I will not be required to work with criminals. I have maintained my position and made it clear, yet I've never had any trouble getting a job. Since I've begun my career, the longest I've not had a job to go to was about a week (that was in 1998 when I was moving across country), yet I've never been forced to do anything I didn't feel comfortable doing.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
... use TeX.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Free PDF distiller
This is a tangent, but I just had to let you know about the free PDF distiller.
There is a way to automatically print PDF's from Word.
Tony
"Use Linux... If not, then use Windows XP, but use Open Office or other compatible tools."
Think outside the box, dude.
A Mac OS X license is cheaper than an XP Prof license, the nearest comparable MS offering, and doesn't contribute a penny to Microsoft. It contains huge chunks for Open Source goodness. It's fun.
Until they simply decide it's in their (x-y-z) best interest to simply, say, raise the price of their products 100%! And they will always have a good (public) reason. In the back room, they're just interested in flooding the market with their SW and make sure it closes every other company. It's paranoid, I know... but if we're not careful, we'll end up with their knife up our throat, and we'll have nothing "else" to rely on... because we would have let them win, by not insisting on questionning the validity of their concern about SW development. IF we allow those companie$ (and not just M$), they can "buy" their way to monopoly and once established firmly, well... bye bye freedom of choice, see you in the next eon or two!
If they raise the prices 100%, I'd make an evaluation -- should I buy it or not. If I buy it, then it must've been worth that price. If I don't, then that gives a competitor the chance to start a business catering to me and other like myself.
The checks-and-balence that is free-market capitalism is that a company will sell something for as high as they can. Any higher, and the customer will either a) buy it, b) not buy any of the product, or c) buy a compeditor's product. A company doesn't want to charge so much that nobody will buy it, so they'll charge the highest price you're willing to pay. Even if there were no choice, yes, we're at the mercy of microsoft, but they couldn't dare charge more than we're willing to pay for their products, otherwise nobody would buy it.
Besides, left alone, if they did reach so-called monopoly status (i.e.: they are the only ones providing an Office product), and they jack up the prices, that sets up the perfect environment for competition to step in and create alternatives. The problem is, with anti-monopoly laws, this natural state is never reached. The justice department penalizes a sucessful company, and usually in the process conceedes to allow them to remain a monopoly if they play nice. This is usually known as regulation.
Cable companies were accused as being monopolies (only because there were few players and nobody got to the point where they were going to start competing for teratory). But the government stepped in, called them monopolies, and said "ok, we'll let you remain a monopoly as long as you regulate your rates." The government creates these artificial monopolies rather than let competition take it's natural course. It happened to the telecommunication industry, railway, etc..
_______
2B1ASK1
XDocs is only competition to the rarely utilized PDF Forms technology, not to PDF entirely. OfficeXML + XDocs does compete somewhat with PDF + PDF Forms.
What is more interesting is that W3C is close to finalizing a candidate recommendation called XForms, and XDocs appears to be very similar in its goals and the requirements it fulfills.
I had been working on a COM server-side XForms processor for my former employer until recently. The goals of a server-side processor are mostly to automate many mundane tasks of web application development: data binding and validation. There are other interesting open source server-side XForms or XForms-inspired processors in Java: chiba.sf.net and Apache Cocoon.
Here is a Mozilla bugzilla feature request. However, I currently do not have the bandwidth to work on a Mozilla version independently due to other Free Software project committments. It would be interesting to combine with some recent achievements in Mozilla embedded WYSIWYG editing like xopus2.
This is what I saw by going to the website article:
Sorry!
Due to a surge in demand following listing on Slashdot, our database has melted. Highly trained monkeys are working flat out to fix this and get the site up and running again.
Sorry once again.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The important lesson that seems to have been missed is... learn enough about the underlying technology to understand whether or not the business model makes sense or not through one's personal analysis, don't make an investment decision based on what the "pundits" say.
So the entire printing industry is going to change over from supporting PDF as an input format that supports everything up to and including embedded job ticket and billing information because Microsoft said "Boo!"
All of us are immediately going to go out and deinstall Acrobat Reader or whatever we're using to read PDFs and buy Office 11 (changing to XP to do it) because all the terabytes of PDF only content are going to magically morph into XDocs.
Yeah, right.
Even if the format is in fact superior, PDF is so much a part of Internet and print and other technologies that it would be years before XDoc content became noticeable enough to make it worth the trouble for end users to download and install a reader.
A company who makes its docs available in XDoc format only means that only Office 11 users will be able to read it. All that company will get as a result will be trouble from angry users. People aren't going to upgrade to Office 11 just to read some company's docs.
However, it does present an investment opportunity for making money off the stupid who are unloading Adobe because they actually believe this bullshit, just like the pre-announcement of the MS antitrust decision did... people snapped up $93 million in MS stock in response to that pre-announcement, including the slashdot readers who got to the pre-announcement from here.
I was wondering who the "pundits" cited in this article were. That's a word that only marketdroids and a few hack journalists that know no better use. The original of this article which was posted without attribution at Linux format can be found here.
Well, the "pundits" exist, a search on XDocs at google reveals this.
Here's a somewhat better article hereWell, the same investor analysts whose stock hyping and premature panic that drove the rise and fall of the bubble are in hype mode now. Apparently, since their understanding isn't past the buzzword level, they just don't get how embedded PDF technology is in American business and particuarly industrial segments like printing.
With the right apps, I can send a PDF file to a printer that can be turned into a gigantic print run without human intervention. If XDocs is all that Microsoft hopes for and enjoys the results that Microsoft wants and comes out on time, I might be able to do the same with XDocs by 2010 or so.
Remember this next time you're tempted to make an investment decision based on what a "pundit" says. Then check the facts yourself, you might make a lot more money by doing the opposite.
Tech Public Policy stuff
"Adobe trapped themselves into a corner when they devoted themselves to a proprietary file format instead of using XML."
Was XML even an option for Adobe when they began designing PDF?
Honest question: Which came first, PDF or XML?
nobody buys stock because they believe in the company that they are buying stocks in. They just buy stock because they think they are going to make money out of somebody elses hard work.
Sure there are mindless drones out there, mearly following anylysts "leads" and speculate based purely on market hype, but getting rich and believing in the company in which you are invested is FAR from seperate. You may perhaps have heard of Warren Buffet, once the wealthiest man in america and certainly richer than any person could ever really imagine being. He got there by ONLY investing in companies which he understands, and in which he believes. Ive got to say that has always turned out pretty well for him, as he ended up looking fairly precient by avoiding the overinflated tech market of the late 90's.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
I'm sure you've come across PDF files on the web. Perhaps you've even thought you'd like to publish some of your documents as PDFs. Then you found out it was a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars.
There is another way. Open Source.
By installing some GNU software (Ghostscript), a printer re-director (RedMon), and a few configurations, you'll be cranking out PDFs from your favorite program just by printing!
I performed this install on Windows XP, so your experience may vary.
1. Install AFPL Ghostscript. In my case, gs704w32.exe.
2. Install RedMon. In my case, redmon17.zip.
3. Go to your Add a New Printer wizard for Windows. a) Make it a local printer and don't automatically detect b) Choose create a new port and select Redirected Port from the dropdown menu. c) Unless you have good reason to do otherwise, just accept the default port name, which should be RPT1 d) Select a printer that has all the features you've always dreamed of your printer having! I chose Apple Color LaserWriter 12/1600 e) Fill out the next few dialog boxes as you see fit. Don't bother to print a test page. f) Now look at your printer's properties, select your new port, and choose to configure it.
4. Adjust your port. At this point, you should have a dialog box for port configuration displayed. Depending on where you installed Ghostscript, your values may vary below. Also, make sure you use the 16bit name for the path. Notice my "Program Files" has been represented as "PROGRA~1". Under Windows XP, you can get these names by using "dir
Field Label: Redirect this port to the program:
Value: C:PROGRA~1gsgs7.04bingswin32c.exe
Field Label: Arguments for this program are:
Value: @C:PROGRA~1gspdfwrite.rsp -sOutputFile="%1" -c save pop -f -
Dropdown Label: Output
Value: Prompt for filename
5. If you didn't notice, the Field Value for Arguments for this program contains a reference to a file pdfwrite.rsp. This is a plain text file and should contain something similar to the following. (Adjust at your own adventure and risk!)
-IC:PROGRA~1gsgs7.04lib;C:PROGRA~1gsfonts
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite
-r300
-dNOPAUSE
-dSAFER
-sPAPERSIZE=letter
Fire up your word processor or spreadsheet program and give it a try!
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
The guy who reposted the article on LinuxFormat should have posted both pages. Page 2 is good enough that I have to retract the word "hack", even if I regard the use of the word "pundit" as at best, ill-advised. But I suspect that the author couldn't say what he really wanted to say about "investor analysts" in the article.
Tech Public Policy stuff
...the Market.
.pdf format is such that, even if Oxx introduces competing functionality, it will likely be met with a big, 'so, what?' by the market.
I am all for not rushing to get the latest version of BeelzeBill's Orifice. Still get quite a bit done in O97, in fact.
There just aren't any compelling reasons to upgrade, other than a newer Oxx arriving on the new box.
Seen from that standpoint, MS's desire to throw in new functionality and stimulate sales seems straightforward.
However, the ubiquity of the
Just blow off XDocs like you blew off LoseCE (or PocketPuke or whatever the nom du jour is) on the handheld. See, I knew you could!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If I remember correctly, the Internal Revenue Service was one of the first really big adopters of Adobe PDF. Since pretty much 100% of all USA folks are loyal customers of the IRS, and government agencies aren't known for changing anything very quickly, I don't think PDF is going away any time soon.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
More than borging its competition, I think that the importance of this is that it is another step in solidifying Microsoft's control of information through DRM.
If you're unhappy because your MS media player won't play your mp3s because you downloaded them from a source that isn't paying MS a cut to lock in digital rights, just wait until MS is holding your documents for ransom too.
(but I think "apt-get install gs-aladdin" is slightly easier =)
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
get it right, adobe's product is illustrator, a very good piece of s/ware imho...
You don't need Acrobat to create PDFs.
[Example]
I may hate PDFs, but I doubt any Microsoft alternative is going to be better. They aren't exactly open source.
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
Not from anything I've read.
Does PDF support an embeddable data hieracrchy like an XML document for machine parsing of its content? Not in any deep way.
XDocs appears to be a technology/application specifically oriented towards Forms -- that is, data entry stuff. PDF is a technology for creating portable printable documents. They are fundamentally different. Could PDF add on a nice XML layer that would give the data a document contains a more meaningful, parseable structure? Yes, but they haven't done so. Could MSFT add a more portable, resolution independent, presentation layer to their data structures? Yup. But not yet. In the meantime, they just aren't directly competing.
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
Maybe Microsoft should do with PDF what they did with Sun's Java: release a highly bastardized and platform dependent implementation of the technology! That way, there's already a huge userbase with "their" technology deployed!
It is not a move against Adobe and pdf documents (which suck IMHO). It is a preemptive strike against XForms before this promising W3C format gets a chance. Another stab at open standard, this time even before specs are finalized.
Direct X
Active X
1)make a brash announcement of technology that's "under development" (bet there's a PDF ver.)
2)make a bunch of know-nothing investors uneasy
3)kick them while they're down
4)buy them
there should be limits on freedom.
More integrated over time? Seems to me like the MS departments for Word and Excel are warring factions, leave alone IE.
I'd agree with this - try opening more than one excel 2000 file, and examine the behaviour, then compare it with opening more than one word 2000 file, and examine the behaviour, particularly with regards to switching between documents, and how to close one of the documents while leaving the other one open. They're not just different, they're a completely different paradigm. Consistency my arse.
http://www.pdfzone.com/news/101357.html
Ever notice how after you open a PDF in a browser session, the AcroRdr32.exe process, which takes up a whopping 20+ MB of RAM, stays resident even AFTER you close that window?
Every time I close a PDF in a browser session now, the first thing I do is go to Task Manager and kill the damn thing. Man, that's annoying.
Does anybody has the google cache link? This site is just dead...
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
. . . take a step into any of the print shops I've worked in or with. I really really really doubt that anyone, whether they're still mac users or have grundgingly made the MS switch after some marketing chicanery regarding compatability or print serving or some such will ever trust the makers of Powerpoint and publisher to make a tool worth investing in supporting, let alone depending upon.
The rule remains: design in whatever you want, but pdf it or go to Kinko's (and they prefer PDFs, too.)
Microsoft are at the market maturity stage of their product life cycle, everyone who needs a computer already has 5. This was not the case 6 years ago when we had the whole navagator v IE when there were still plenty of people without a computer. So by that logic, the practises that they used in the past will not work in todays environment IMHO.
Today I find it difficult to find people who have even bothered to upgrade to WinXP, the only person who did, a friend with broadband, just downloaded a pirated version off the internet before ditching it it favour of win2000, a week later. Clearly the only thing Microsoft can do to compete is to start giving windows away for free, and its going to be a cooled day in hell before that happens.
...there used to be a defacto licensing fee, at least to create Acrobat files. You used to need Adobe Acrobat Distiller to create PDF files. Now, there are a plethora of other tools one can use to create PDF files w/o needing Acrobat for most purposes...
It seems to me that the PDF format is very very deeply entrenched out there. PDF has had a lot of years to penetrate so deeply.
I know MS is powerful, but are they SO powerful that they can unseat an open format that is second only to HTML in popularity for web publishing?
I'm skeptical.
PDF article, huh?
Pdf995: create PDF's for FREE!
Quote from Slashdot's own banner ad shown above.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
is that the site returns a 'slashdotted page' instead of a 404 error
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
when the newly patched ms program won't read the .....
"portable" files created by Xdocs1 version without
the patch level 3 and the whole file will be in
a format that won't allow you to read it at all
unless you're on the latest and greatest windows
xp++
enough. Give me vi and a text file. what's
the damn escape sequence for a right upper
corner again?
Although I am not much of a Microsoft fan, I do have to give the Dark Lord's minions a few points for that one
utter rubbish
Seems to me that this is impetus to have an open source system for publishing documents to the web. I post documents to the web for my students. They all use ms word, but I'm unwilling to post the docs in that. However, I need for them to appear as I want them to appear, so html is not going to work. Instead, for the moment, I post in .pdf format. If there were something else, something free or at least open source, I would use it in a second. Maybe, just maybe, having ms take over the market (which they would likely do if they actually produce this software) will lead to an open product. "Isn't it pretty to think so."
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
:) Do the stockholders of Adobe think even for a moment that M$ can compete with Adobe's powerful por video editing tools? NO WAY! pick up a copy of primere or after effects and compare that to microshaft's movie maker. in this case simple=weak. then there is the ever popular photoshop, illustrator, and image ready, all worshiped by both pc, mac, and linux users (at least the ones with dual boot boxen) come on...
Blame it on ElGeeko De Generico [generic geek]
Office 11??? XDocs???
Think of one of those cools double-vision posters...
You know... the ones where you have to look cross-eyed to see the hidden image.
Who's the real target X...11...
i.e. anything that relates to X11
My god. X this X that X the other thing... now even Macintosh has been infected with the stupid X idea.
Was X Windows such an awesome name that people just had to go gluing it onto everything? Honestly, the X reminds me of two silly concepts.
One, calling everything "EXTREME". Space Moose had that category pretty well handled.
Two, people on AIM sticking X after their name because they can't be the only "ShAdOw", "DESTRUCTOR" or "GandalF". And if ShAdOwX is already taken, why, jam another X on the front of it, until you get xxxXXX-ShADoW-XXXxxx. Ultima Online is infested with this sort of behavior.
Phooey. X sucks no matter where it is.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Windows XP has apt-get? Wow, it's better than I thought.
Liam Healy
adobe \A*do"be\, n. 1. Earth from which unburnt bricks are made. Looks like a case of FUD for Mud.
XBox, XDocs. Hey, lets call our new product XWindows!
If this happens I might as well shoot myself in the face. Please mod this down.
Not by default, but it can easily be installed on a XP machine:
Obtain Debian CDs/DVD
Remove Windows (optional)
Install Debian
???
profit
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
1) OpenOffice CLAIMS to be able to handle Office files. It fails to make that true, even in simple spreadsheets that don't conatin any special features.
2) You seem to have overlooked the result of importing the same data from CSV files.
3) You also missed the fact that even though OpenOffice only imported half of the data, it was using more than twice the RAM XL was using for the full workbook.
And if you find it normal that importing a spreadsheet, even from an "alien" format, takes 50 times as long as opening it in its native application...
The PDF format has it's claws in exactly the same way Windows dose.
The reason we don't bitch about PDF is Adobe puts out an ok product and dosen't play games.
If I want my documents printed at Kinkos I gotta use pdf. If I want to download govenment paperwork it's pdf. If I want to view my palm manual it's pdf. If I want to read the documentation of some of the latest free software documents it's pdf.
Adobe sells document creation software and permits free versions unencumbered with encryption. They give away free readers for most platforms.
Microsofts history is they don't share.
As long as Microsoft word document format enjoys more universal support the xdoc isn't going anywhere.
If Netscape owned HTML Microsoft IE wouldn't have gone anywhere.
Netscape moved the exsisting web to use Netscape extentions and Microsoft need only support those extentions in it's own product and add more.
But PDF is a diffrent. The markets going to switch to xdoc as fast as they'll switch to Linux or Mac.
I don't actually exist.
I am quite happy that we (well, actually, France) also have nukes: GWB will not treat us like Iraqis. After all, we are becoming a "rebel market" in Bush' eyes...
If France is such a great market, then give up your farm subsidies.
The EU spends half of its budget on farm subsidies - mostly going to France and Germany.
The only thing scarier than Iraq with nukes (because they'll use them) is France with nukes (because they'll surrender to the first reservist with a sheep dog and a cirbine who crosses the border).
My Heart Is A Flower
So... Do you feel better about yourself now?
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
DonÂt respect anyone or anything, works in the most devious ways with fast blows and undying effort.
Do you think iÂm describing the common terrorist personality? Well, maybe, but I talking about Microsoft way of working. This company doesnÂt respect ONE single open standard, and if thatÂs not enough, they try to destroy every single major product that doesnÂt belong to them. Maybe they should chage the name of theri new "office" to "Office 9/11", the terrorists of open standards.
I'm going to reply once more, for the sake of education, but then I'm done.
1) There are fine PDF editors out there. Acrobat is not an editor, in the general sense of the term - it is more of a PDF metadata editor with bundled PDF creation tools for other editors.
2) Definition of terms:
- trapping: Selectively overlapping colors at print time so that the elasticity of paper, lateral drift, etc. do not leave gaps between different areas and bleeds off the page don't leave a white border. Take a magnifying glass to a mass market magazine ad some time, especially at the intersection between light colors and areas in black - you'll see it.
- font kerning: I don't know what you're talking about with Mozilla and Helvetica. What I'm talking about is a designer's ability to specify the space between letters to a high degree of precision. And I haven't gotten in to baseline shifting yet.
- font deformation: Scaling a font horizontally or vertically in a carefully defined way.
- CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, AKA 4 color printing. That's the color model nearly all mass amrket printing is done in (some add Pantone colors, but that's expensive). Contrast with RGB, the method used for all the graphics on the web. One is for print, one is for CRTs.
- PPD device hints: Using a machine readable description of a printer to better display on screen what the printer will do with it.
- multi-layer transparency screen angle adjustments: Automatically altering the screen angle of certain pages based on the nature of the colors used when rendering overlapping objects with transparency in order to avoid Moire patterns. Explaining screen angles is not something I'm going to get in to. Google it if you're really interested.
So if these are the lowsy features, why are you stressing them?
They aren't lousy (or lowsy), they're a baseline. If you can't do them, you're not in the race. HTML can't.
3) Well, if they aren't setup to handle one format, then giving something to them in that format wont exactly work will it? See how well they do when you hand them a WordStar document.
You're making my case for me. No, prepresses don't handle Wordstar, or HTML, or Word XP for that matter, for a reason. That reason is that the formats do not offer sufficient control over the output.
For some perspective, I did (no longer do) production for a small magazine - we printed ~120K issues every two months. Each issue cost about $230K to print, including all of the business angles. Profit margins then were on the order of 1%, and I hear it is worse now. If you fuck up (which I did, once, everyone does getting started), you cost your company serious money. More than one magazine has failed over printing mistakes. Quark format documents work brilliantly nearly all the time, but is complex, which leads to failures. PDF works briliantly, and is much less complex. HTML is a joke for these environments.
Of course, the fact remains that anyone can convert HTML to PS/PDF practically in their sleep.
Sure. That doesn't mean the result is going to print well. It will look like a web page, and have horrible color problems.I still encourage you to do the experiment - Offset print a web page, and compare it to a copy of any mass market magazine out there.Here's another experiment - take a copy of WiReD, and duplicate a page in HTML. I'm sure it is possible, using the Z axis and a lot of time. Now display it in another browser. Which one is the reference platform for the result when you print it? The nature of Postscript is that it displays the same everywhere. HTML is becoming a user interface description language, not a print language.
I forget what 8 was for.
Step 4 is obviously "Start a Linux consulting business" ;)
Anybody know if you could port Apt-get and/or PRM to something like Windows/Cygwin or Gnu/Interix?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If you think xdocs and acrobat are equivalent, then the same could be said about any word processor or html editor or desktop publishing tool, etc.
M$ will try to convince their lusers that XML is somehow open or free and get them to use it over pdf. They already do so much with Word.doc and rtf. So you are right, they would like you to use Word as your MSML (aka MSXML) editor for everything.
The clueless types of companies that still use M$ on their desktops when they could have software that writes pdf or ps for free already, will go this way. M$ convinces these fools that anything not M$ is an additional computer cost. They can't see through the fog and try to eliminate all non M$, even when TOC of alternate software is demonstrably lower. M$ builds it's case one application at a time, and makes sure the results are favorable. Next years licenssing prices then suck up the difference and then some, but SOME PEOPLE JUST DONT GET IT. They have been convinced of every silly lie that M$ has ever put out, that free software can never produce a practical operating system, that free software is never going to be user friendly, that free software will cost more money, that free software is full of bugs, blah blah blah. Suckers who think they are very clever. They are the same dumb asses that post word docs on the internet and email mail them as forms to be filled out. They will be happy to dump Adobe just as soon as M$ makes it harder to use and offers a second rate alternative.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Yo, Mike!"
"Yeah, Gabe?"
"We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah."
"I thought you fixed that last century!"
"No, no, not that. Someone's found a security problem in the physics
program. They're getting energy out of nowhere."
"Blessit! Lemme look... Hey, it's
there all right! OK, just a sec...
There, that ought to patch it. Dist it out, wouldja?"
-- Cold Fusion, 1989
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