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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.
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.
Also there have been very FEW viruses that infect PDF's, imagine the viruses that will be written for M$'s version.
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"
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.
"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