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.""
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$oft will be more than ever open to various suits and legal action. Adobe may even end up being victorious.
Adobe refused to play ball with MS. They must therefore be destroyed.
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For great justice!
They are doing that because the new M$ 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...
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
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. :)
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.
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*.
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...
Not according to the final decision handed down by judge CKK. She has given an official endorsement to this behavior. Look to see Microsoft take on all its U.S. competitors. This may be the drop that washes the U.S. recession into a depression.
European leaders are less likely to not get caught with their mouths open.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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.
Remember that the DOJ is an executive-branch body; it doesn't include the judiciary. In the current system of US government, the purpose of executive agencies is to carry out those laws which correspond to the particular preferences of the administration then in power. At the moment, that's a Republican administration more friendly to (read: owned by) big business than any in recent memory.
Also there have been very FEW viruses that infect PDF's, imagine the viruses that will be written for M$'s version.
But surely the ideal solution would be for M$ Word to support PDF docs. That would please all users.
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
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
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
Bah! I have some issues with PDFs.
A gzipped postscript file is always smaller than a PDF. Add bzip2 compression, and it's even smaller.
Neither PS or PDF can be modified significantly or easilly. Even with Acrobat, you can change some text, but you can't move anything around.
Similar to the previous, you can't easilly parse and modify it, non-interactively. If I want to change something in all my HTML files, I have no problem. To do it in PDF is a nightmare.
What I think we need is an HTML archive. That way, you can distribute a single file that contains one or more HTML files, along with all the images, CSS, et al. It could simply be a zip or tar file. And, of course, browers and editors need to understand how to fully utilize that archive. Right now, if you delete an image from a page, it doesn't remove the image file; that would need to change.
The only thing HTML needs to match PDF is a page-break character, so you can closely control the page layout (if you want to), and someone else could easilly change that layout you wanted, for their own needs/preferences.
That would be easy to modify interactively, easy to script/automate changes. Easy to create, easy to distribute, print, etc. Everything that PDF is, and everything that it isn't.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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"
1) Consumers will save money: Bzzt. PDF Viewer is free. Additionally, the format for PDF is published so that people can write both viewers and creators for free.
If it's free, then why does anyone care what Microsoft does. Do we really think that consumers are stupid enough to pay for something when there's a perfectly acceptable free alternative? Microsoft won't sell much of it's product unless it is vastly superior, with all of the free alternatives out there... :) Oh, wait... some people don't consider the 13 hours it took them to get the 'free' version working to constitute a costless endevour.
2) Consumers will have extra money: Bzzt. Again wrong. You have PDF which is still free versus a feature that will be included in the latest version of Office, which isn't free. Additionally, XDocs competes with the Forms feature in PDF, not with PDF in general.
Ok... you've said it again, there is a great free alternative out there. Consumers must be very naive. Look, most people I know aren't going to pay $800 for the latest version of Office unless it benefits them in some way that they foresee to have value greater than the $800 they're spending.
So, have you looked at the price MS charges for Office? Oh yeah, in addition you'll need to be running Win 2K SP3 or XP in order to run this version of Office.
Yes, see the $800 figure above.
Now on to your straw man. The poster wasn't saying that the fall of PDF was going to destroy the economy. He was stating that the settlement handed to MS will give them carte blanche to wage full scale war against any and all "competitors" in the computer industry.
The thing you're missing, and the thing that most people who are heavily emotionally invested in the debate miss, is that nobody is being forced to use anything. If half of the hours spent on Slashdot arguing about this were dedicated to competing with Microsoft, GNU/Linux would have won at least a year or two ago.
Saying that there's a monopoly is really a way to cloud the issue, becuase most people have been taught since the third grade that monopolies are bad. Anti-trust legislation is intended to protect consumers. It is necessary to show how consumers have been harmed in order to successfully enact anti-trust penalties against a company.
Think about it. If you start a company you look around and see that you have competetors. Your competetors spend every waking moment trying to edge your company out. You do the same. It's called competition. Businesses don't gain anything by running neck-and-neck with the next guy, they need to develop as much advantage as possible. In fact, business is actually a competition to see who can have the fewest all-around competetors, which is why companies always try to expand their offerings and services. This is called competetive differentiation. The more competetive advantage you have, the more money you can make which you can then spend on innovation to further that advantage. Anti-trust law exists because sometimes consumers are harmed when one company becomes too successful. Note, I said sometimes, not always.
Suppose Microsoft had not been very successful but managed to retain some maintenance business based on that original MS-DOS contract. Would the world be a better place? Who knows. Would Linus have had that original MINIX system to tinker with? By saying monopolies are always bad, you are applying no critical thought to the issue.
THAT could lead to further damage to the economy as we see how MS prices things once they get control of the market segment.
So again you make the "consumers are dumb" argument. If Windows + Office cost $2000, I bet a LOT more companies would be using Linux/OpenOffice. It's kind of like the issue of oil vs. alternative fuel. We would all like to be able to use alternatively powered vehicles, but right now Oil is just cheaper b/c there is an existing infrastructure (gas pumps everyhwere). Economically, Microsoft stuff is cheaper than Linux, because of the advantages gained by the fact that everyone uses it. When that changes, Linux will win. One can already see some effects of Linux's success: Microsoft is moving to more and more open standards, IBM has embraced Linux, and there are fewer and fewer reasons not to use linux.
You don't have to grow your hair long and develop a festering hatred for Microsoft in order to believe that Linux will win. You just have to believe that most people wouldn't mind saving some money and that markets actually work.
Amazing magic tricks
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.
It wasn't always fully open... I've followed xpdf for many years. In the early days, Derek could not show encrypted PDF files because Adobe would not release specs on the encryption . Long ago, xpdf printed a message with contact info for someone at Adobe, saying "contact them and tell them to make good on their claim that PDF is an open format" (or something like that... it's been years). Apparantly there was quite a bit of tension between Adobe and Derek, and people from Adobe claimed (lied) that xpdf could not show those files because Derek was a bad programmer. Finally, Adobe relented and released full specs including the encryption. This probably never would have occured if it weren't for Derek Noonburg and his xpdf program (and Adobe's initial refusal to release a linux version of acrobat reader).
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
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:
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.
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.
No entirely true. Max OS X has the abilty to create PDFs without any other Adobe product installed. Yes, Apple probably paid royalties to Adobe to put the technology into their OS, but I didn't see a price change from the last OS update, so it couldn't have been that much. And that makes it free for me, doesn't it?
"I drank what?" - Socrates
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."
If anything, XML will be the PDF-killer.
Amen, I hope so. I always thought that perhaps SVG would fill this role. Why hasn't SVG gained more momentum (along w/ MathML, etc.)? IIRC, I think there were a couple of patent snafu's, along w/ perhaps some text handling deficiencies. But I'm not really qualified to say. Can anyone provide some insight into SVG's ability to play in this space?
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
"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
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.
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.
"Use" in the sense of "implementing an application that can read and write them with 100% reliability." (Or as close to 100 as you can get with software these days, so, like, 8.3%.) Even OpenOffice.org can't use them completely reliably.
"Use" in the sense of "as a replacement to PDF," too. PDF (and maybe its big brother, PostScript), right now, is *the* standard for document portabilty where layout *and* content are the concern.
Possibly, Microsoft's goal is to create a document specification that handles more than just page layout and content, to include presentation-, spreadsheet-, and database-type content as well. That would be interesting. However, I think I'd like to see MS participate in one of the open XML development/discussion groups on standard, non-proprietary file formats for office-type applications.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
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.
Just about
have to buy a piece of software that costs hundreds of dollars to be able to produce these documents
Your kidding right? Oh, Sorry, you must be using a Windoze box. I've been using ps2pdf for years. Also, any Mac OS X application that can "Print" can produce a PDF.
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"
First of all, your client is right. Secondly, PDF documents can be down right tiny (unless your building them "without-a-clue"). For example, I just downloaded the zsh users guide this weekend in PDF format -- about 1100 Kb for 415 pages. A fully formatted and WYSIWYG'ed document for only 2.65 Kb per page. Here it is [1110 Kb PDF File]
never mind that a single one is 700Kb who's going to sit through downloading that???)
Yes, I remember fearing those dreaded 700Kb downloads .... in 1989.
Oddly enough the $99 JASC PaintShop Pro is about the closest thing on the market to a Photoshop killer. Even so there are situations where I prefer photoshop.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
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.