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.""
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
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.
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 :
is here:
s p
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xdocs/default.a
Why don't get the answers from the horse's mount. Check out http://www.microsoft.com/office/xdocs/faq.asp where it becomes clear that it's a form filling application to enable organisation to let their users put in data in XML format. Doesn't sound like PDF to me, well not very much. I know you cna make forms in Acrobat and they work pretty darn well), but Acrobat is more focused on presentation rather than data.
Let me guess, IE7 will include built in support for them.
It was mentioned at MozillaZine for a month ago or so that IE7 won't be released (although I have my doubts) and Microsoft will go 100% MSN Explorer in future releases of Windows.
But I'm sure what you meant was "Let me guess, The Next Browser will include built-in support for them" and I guess that's likely.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
| * MS Office uses a closed, proprietary format |and that's bad.
| * OpenOffice uses XML, and that's good.
| * Now Microsoft want to use XML too... but |that's also bad
Big difference:
Microsoft's DTD (Document Type Definitions) are proprietary, which makes use of the open framework XML just as proprietary.
Microsoft's use of XML *is* bad indeed.
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!
The DjVu folks seem to have created a very fine format for the storage of scanned documents of random layout. It uses space efficiently, and produces good-looking (though imperfect - think JPEG) results. It's the only way I know of to preserve the look of a paper document without throwing away vast amounts of storage.
But, as far as I can tell, that's where the fun stops. AFAIK, it doesn't handle vector graphics, and has nothing to offer over PDF for strictly digital documents. In the digital world, PDF produces perfect results, automatically.
OTOH, PDF is not geared toward scanned documents. I've seen a lot of examples of, say, scanned datasheets in PDF; all of them were bad.
I thus submit that each respective format has its own well-defined niche, and fills it admirably.
Ghostview certainly could support DjVu, if someone wrote the appropriate code for ghostscript. That it supports GIF, JPEG, PNG and PDF would tend to indicate that it's well within the scope of the software's design parameters.
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
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."
I think you'll find that Microsoft ensured that the "best product" never got made, because they knew it wouldn't be theirs.
Nope. They have good devs just as other firms. the "best product" wouldn't be made because MS will not be able to charge for an upgrade later.
This is not an MS-specific tactic, many SW firms use it, but MS has used it most successfully, so far.
problem with this kind of tactic is that eventually it WILL backfire.
Working for necessity's mother.
But why is Excel the best? Is it because they just made a better product and everybody else gave up because they couldn't innovate? Or is it because Microsoft crushed the opposition by exploiting their monopoly?
The first ever "killer app" for the PC was Lotus 1-2-3, which for a long while was the best spreadsheet on the market. At this point MS didn't have a monopoly, PCs ran SCP-DOS, MD-DOS, OS/2, AIX (yes, even the same). Word processing? Would you like to use AmiPro? WordPerfect? Word?...
In short, there once *was* a point where Microsoft had to stop being a teeny company peddling BASIC interpreters and crappy DOS interfaces and gain a monopoly, which later they could exploit.
In short, yes. People did see Excel as better. Now whether these people were end users or ISVs doesn't matter from MS's point of view. Someone bought their software, and bought it in plentificationaryness.
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.
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.
Uhm, Pagemaker was originally made by Aldus. Adobe got Pagemaker by buying Aldus and killing off the company. Now Adobe is trying to kill Pagemaker itself with their Indesign.
Photoshop succeeded because it was made by photographers (the Knoll brothers) for photographers. It could handle CMYK separations, crucial for any prepress work.
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."
---
Yes. From the PDF specification:
Adobe gives permission to anyone to:
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
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...
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
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.
Then in Open Office 1.0.1:
The slight mangling by the Slashdot <ecode> interpreter aside, I'm frankly not exactly enamoured with either of them. HTML is an appaling format for a WYSIWYG document. The native zipped XML produced by OpenOffice is better, but (unzipped) weighs in at 15,172 bytes for 43 characters of content. I think the only reasonable conclusion is that word processer formats are the epitome of a good compromise; they leave everybody unhappy.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
... is here, since the site is refusing connections.
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.
XML has the potential to be a PDF-killer, indeed. I can imagine some sort or archive where a XSL-FO layout has SVG images embedded, and maybe JPG files attached. It could grow to be very PDF-like.
However, you have to remember that Adobe has been working on PDF since before there was a XML to use. Adobe has recently celebrated ten years working on PDF; XML has only been standardized on 1998, or six years later.
Also, they have jumped on the XML bandwagon, as much as they could. They first did PGML, a sort of PDF-meets-XML. MS counterattacked with VML, and W3C standardized SVG taking ideas from both. And Adobe is now one of the biggest proponents of SVG.
Not much of a hit. Adobe was up 10% yesterday.
XML COMES! XML CONQUERS! XML is the best thing since the sliced bread! XML RULES!
Ahem.
PDF isn't exactly a closed format. PostScript wasn't exactly a closed format either.
PostScript was designed from ground up to be a page description language. PDF was based on ideas from PostScript.
XML, on the other hand, was designed to mark up content in semantic way. The whole idea was NOT to make something that describes the layout, but rather the structure of the content. The layout was left for other technologies.
XML will definitely not displace PostScript or PDF as a page description language. As a content format it's a great thing, perhaps, but not as a print format.
Almost all sightes are "geared" towards IE, but most of these luckly use generic enough code that it doesn't break on IE only browsers. And some even test on other browsers. But 99% of sites are made for IE first, then some of them are fixed to work on other browser.
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.
1. which is now 99% geared towards IE
That is false. 99% of the web does not require IE. Very few sites actually require IE. Mostly clueless idiots.
Some recent surveys on browsers indicate that IE is used by about 96% of users. That's not 99, but I think it's sufficiently large that any web site developer will insure first that their pages look good in IE, then maybe Netscape, if they have time. The W3 standards are all fine and good, but the de facto standard is defined by how IE behaves. MS owns that behavior and can change it at will.
2. Um... please explain how something that's free can get any cheaper.
Adobe charges money for its PDF creation products. They are not free. MS is competing with them. Therefore, Adobe's products will get cheaper or Adobe will lose the market. Imagine that.
I think distribution of a PDF competitor as part of a default distribution of Windows or Office would kill off Adobe's version of PDF in much the same manner that bundling of IE with Windows killed off Netscape, despite the latter being reduced to zero price. It was more hassle for people to download some large binary from Netscape over their modems and to try to disentangle IE's tentacles, that most people just caved in and accepted IE as their browser. It's been demonstrated that zero price is not enough to compete with Microsoft.
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. And wither it will, because Office, too, is used by about 90% of the office productivity suite marketplace.
When a desperate Adobe offers an Office plug-in for free download that enables one to write PDF, they'll get the same rousing response as Netscape did for free downloads of its application.
I don't want to belabor these points because how MS operates is well-known by now.
That said, however, the basic technical ideas of both PDF and of XDoc are good.
Publishing their respective specifications and letting an international standards body ratify those standards is a great idea. I would move to XDoc from PDF if it were technically-sound, completely and openly published, and ratified by an international standards organization.
Companies, either Adobe or Microsoft, trying to own a standard and use it to wring the most dollars out of it, simply by tripping up the competition with a deft change of the standard is not a good idea.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
It's in the developer builds.
Under UNIX based systems where spadmin, the printer administration program, uses ghostscript, ps2pdf, etc. We're working on a new 'create PDF' feature on all the platforms we support, you can find it in the 'developer' builds today.
The full document is Here
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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.
To be fair, by most reports Stalin killed 10 million of his own people
And to be accurate, Stalin killed about 43 million between 1939 and 1953. Take a look at R.J. Rummel's web site for accurate analyses of historical acts of democide.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Acrobat Reader is even worse. When it runs in 'embedded' mode in your browser, it acts significantly different from when it runs 'outside' the browser. In fact, if you load some PDFs in embedded mode it will fail to load properly, but if you simply tell it to load outside the browser it will load the file fine. These are known problems on the Acrobat/PDF 'support' boards. Some of the problems have more to do with IE, but if that is the case the default should not be to run Acrobat embedded. What is sad is that these and other problems simply languish out there for YEARS and Adobe doesn't really seem to care about these problems.
In other words, Adobe had very poor tools for developers wanting to build PDFs, and poor support for Acrobat Reader. Yeah, some third parties sprung up to fill the void...but I'd like a little competition to get Adobe out of their slumber. They have been sitting on Adobe and Photoshop for too long now.
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.
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?"
The tags are readable - the data may/may not be readable. Documenting the tags and then sticking undocumented binary data (1s and 0s) between them doesn't make it very usefull.
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.
Sorry to disagree with you, but PDF is not as bad as you make it out to be.
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?)
Ever hear of Ghostscript? ps2pdf? I've been using a ps2pdf printer I set up over Samba for ages with no problem.
For exchanging static information with clients, it's the best thing that I've come across. Images get too unwieldy, and Postscript just isn't as widely supported as PDF.
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
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
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?
Why PDF was made, I never understood...
Apparently not everyone has use for the extra features. My favourites are: