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.""

Comments

Stock took a hit?

[sjelkjd]

People are really paranoid.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[commodoresloat]

No doubt. How is MS still this powerful, that the mere breath of possible vaporware is enough to send investors scurrying away from the competition? People have seen through their shenanigans for years, have even demonstrated some of them (though perhaps the least noxious of them) in open court, and yet when they say jump the only thing we can say is how high? It's pathetic.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[NightRain]

No doubt. How is MS still this powerful, that the mere breath of possible vaporware is enough to send investors scurrying away from the competition?

That says as much about the sad state of the way the stock market works as it does about MS. If people believe that other people believe this will affect Adobe, then they will bail out before those 'other people' do. This of course causes other people to bail out, and the next thing you know, the bottom has dropped out of the stock.

Ray

Re:Stock took a hit?

[klui]

So the company who is more powerful than the U.S. Government wants to take on Adobe, the perception is Adobe is in big trouble.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[ProfessorPuke]

Don't call it sad! Look at it as your own chance to pick up bargain shares!

Re:Stock took a hit?

[Scarblac]

That says as much about the sad state of the way the stock market works as it does about MS.

After the result of the lawsuit came out, MS stock went up, of course. And then, so did the stock of a lot of other tech companies. After all, as my newspaper explains, when the biggest company of them all goes up so much, that means the whole sector must be on a rise!

So, in short, stock market logic:
1. Microsoft abuses their competitors, abusing a monopolistic stranglehold on many other businesses
2. But they avoid bad punishment in the resulting lawsuit, and can basically continue their practices
3. That's good for Microsoft!
4. That must be good for the competition!!
("5. Profit!" occurs only in their dreams).

Re:Stock took a hit?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly how to cause a market collapse. Give nervous investers a reason to sell, then buy up all the depressed stockes for a penny on the dollar. Thats how the International Banks took over the US in 1929, and its how the Rothchilds took over England after Napoleon had lost Waterloo.

Only simple foolish investors like us take the bath. The proper people always make money.

Just an FYI, expect another -25% return on anything you have in the market today. You should be good after that. But, how long will it take to get that 25% back?

Re:Stock took a hit?

[uchian]

That comment (and it's moderation) shows that the stock market is in an even sadder state of affairs - 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.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[techstar25]

Obviously those stockholders have never heard of Photoshop or Illustrator, software so dominating that MS had to quietly pull their own competing Photodraw off the shelf, just to save face. I'll be glad to pick up those bargain shares.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[jez9999]

But that was what the stock market was always for... getting rich. People never bought shares in a company because they liked the company. Maybe because they thought it would perform well, yes, but the only only people who own shares in a company because they like it are possibly the company's owners/workers.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[Blkdeath]

People are really paranoid.

... and ignorant. I can't "RTFA" because it seems to be quite Slashdotted (off the face of the Earth, I'd say) but isn't PDF's strength the PORTABLE aspect of it?

When I want to e-mail an invoice, I can feel comfortable sending it in a PDF file as opposed to, say, an Excell spreadsheet, because I know that whatever platform my customer is running will have one or a hundred PDF readers. Be it his Windows workstation, Linux machine, his iPaq or Palm Pilot, or his Apple G4 - he'll be able to read my invoice.

So if Microsoft's new format is supposed to kill off PDF - wouldn't they have to succumb and create a reader for {gasp!} Linux?

Oh, and every other platform in existance while they're at it ...

Re:Stock took a hit?

[Skjellifetti]

How else do you propose that people who have possibly interesting ideas or technology get access to the capital that they need to develop that technology? Trying to decide where to invest your money is hard work, too. And maybe, just maybe, it is even a reasonable thing to dump Adobe if it looks like a better technology from a better financed company is coming down the highway even if that new technology won't be here for 12-18 months. Looks to me like the stock market is functioning the way it should: estimating the discounted expected rate of return on investment.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[rogerz]

I would like to think the actual logic went something like:

1) Microsoft offers products people like to use/buy in the market, causing some businesses pain, and others to flourish. Mostly, it promotes the diffusion of information technology throughout the American and world economy.
2) The government inserts its coercive nose into this situation, seemingly helping some of Microsoft's direct competitors, but in reality raising the specter of intrusive meddling in the computer business, and the accompanying distortions and uncertainty. And, by the way, those competitors do little (if any) innovating of their own during the long period in which Microsoft is on trial.
3) After a settlement is reached, the market breathes a general sigh of relief in the (probably vain) hope that this will mean the end of these shenanigans. Maybe now everyone will get back to business.

But, the parent is probably right that this is just the usual short-term market madness. I predict Sun et. al. will continue their gradual decline as long as their primary corporate vision seems to be "whine about Microsoft".

Re:Stock took a hit?

[Blkdeath]

The answer to the question posed is NO!

Then we can rest assured that it won't be a PDF killer, can't we?

Great - now I can rest easy!

Re:Stock took a hit?

[Blkdeath]

The sad thing is that many morons wouldn't know what to do with a PDF since they have never heard of Adobe. The way to send docs so you know other people can read them is ( Yikes ) MSWord.

Most of our business customers (small or large) use PDF as their globally accepted format for documents. Especially in cases where agents are frequently on the road, they need a format that's always available.

We actually had issue with one such customer because Outlook Express decided that PDFs were "insecure attachments" and not to be permitted. Needless to say, the company is sufficiently large that a changing their document format is out of the question. More likely they'll be changing e-mail clients instead.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[joto]

Well, on the other hand, most so-called tech companies aren't competitors to Microsoft. They make software that relies on Microsoft products to work. (i.e. windows, office, vb, ie, etc...) So what's bad for Microsoft is bad for them as well. Not everyone can be making OSes and Office-suites...

That being said, the stock market is designed to be unstable and fluctuate. Why it doesn't fluctuate even more is beyond my understanding, but there must be some factors that stabilize it as well (they are called long-term investors, I guess).

Re:Stock took a hit?

[joto]

For me, the main feature of PDF is probably portability, yes. For 95% of the computing world, it's the fact that it's a distribution format that sucks less than office documents, has a free reader, and works on Windows.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[jasonditz]

I would guess the hit ADBE took today is more related to the downgrade from Deutsche Securities than anything MSFT did.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[Anonvmous Coward]

" People have seen through their shenanigans for years, have even demonstrated some of them (though perhaps the least noxious of them) in open court, and yet when they say jump the only thing we can say is how high? It's pathetic."

Why's it so pathetic? There are a number of glaring annoyances with both the PDF format and the PDF viewer. MS is quite up to the task of creating something that the end user will prefer. They'd easily kick Adobe's butt.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[Skjellifetti]

Anyway, the problem lies when we all sell stock in every other company and buy shares in MS instead, because we perceive them to be "better financed". This causes them to become even more "better financed" and wipe the floor with it competitors

You are not usually buying the stock from MS, rather from a current shareholder who wishes to sell. MS gets no additional financing unless they issue more shares. If there is a rush to dump stock A and buy B, then the price of A falls and B rises until the expected return of A and B are equal to each other and to some "normal" market rate of return. If they differ, an arbitrager can make money by selling one and buying the other.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[certron]

"Ben & Jerry's (the ice cream people) has always been a hippie's stock. Instead of paying out dividents, they spend all their profits on charities. Somehow, the investors don't seem to mind."

Well, there's also the annual shareholders meetings. From what I've heard, Ben & Jerry's is no Johnson & Johnson. :-) A live concert, some carnival rides, and no doubt an abundance of ice cream. Shareholders also get coupons for ice cream every year, so I offer this as one example of owning shares because they like and believe in the company. But yeah, it's pretty rare, as companies go.

Hey, what kind of shareholder benefits does one get for owning Playboy stock?

Re:Stock took a hit?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yeah, Ben & Jerry's never used business practices like Microsoft did. They're hippies, and beyond reproach because they give money to the whales.

Let me tell you a story about Ben & Jerry's and their supercool business. A few years back, a local girl was doing well in her ice cream parlor business. Her product was popular, and regularly consumed by the populace. She thought it would be a good idea if she put the icy concoction in the stores for people to buy.

Bad move. With blinding speed Ben & Jerry's let the local grocery stores know that there was no room for multiple brands of premium ice cream on the shelf. Either Amy's ice cream went, or Ben & Jerry's, an established brand, would pull all their products from store shelves. The gambit worked, and in less than a week Amy's Ice Cream was no longer availible for purchase.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[flossie]

I was recently asked to re-submit a CV (resume) in MS word format because the stupid girl in personnel didn't know how to open a PDF. I mailed her a hardcopy instead. Sending documents in Word is not usually a good option. If they are using a different version, there is a very good chance that the document will look completely naff when they open it. If a document is trans-atlantic, you can guarantee it will look poor when printed because Word kindly re-formats documents with about one word on every other page as it can't cope with the different paper sizes.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[PinkStainlessTail]

Doesn't surprise me one damn bit. I'm getting bupkiss on Google, though: do you know of a source with more info on this?

Re:Stock took a hit?

[0x0d0a]

And you think Microsoft would be a good replacement?

Re:Stock took a hit?

[ces]

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.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[ProfessorPuke]

Ben & Jerrys is a Vermont company- where you incorporate determines the laws that applies to your company. Depending on how they plan to do business, many corporations (if they don't just file where their headquarters is) will choose to get a Nevada or New Jersey corporate charter, because each has a different set of very advantageous laws.

The corporate law in Vermont is different, however. Vermont is the only state where corporations have a greatly reduced obligation to their shareholders. Normally a corp's board or CEO can be sued if he acts against the financial interests of the stockholders. However, Vermont companies are allowed to balance shareholder responsibility against the public welfare.

Thus, Vermont is an attractive state for a company whose image focuses on social issues.

Re:Stock took a hit?

[NightRain]

Microsoft uses FreeBSD for their Hotmail service, most people would be expecting windows, wouldn't you? IIRC they actually swapped over to Win2K except for the DNS servers or something. But most to the servers run on MS OS's. Ray

Just a side note

[ruckc]

Let me guess, IE7 will include built in support for them.

Re:Just a side note

[billd]

Adobe refused to play ball with MS. They must therefore be destroyed.

Re:Just a side note

[e8johan]

Sure IE will come with support for it, and of course that support is not optional, you'll end up downloading and installing it no matter what (as long as you insist on using Windows).

As Office evolves it will be more and more integrated into IE and even though IE is not required by the OS, it will be required by Office. I believe that the recent ruling only concerned their dominance in the OS area, not in productive software (i.e. Office), but I may be wrong about that.

Re:Just a side note

[Jugalator]

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.

Re:Just a side note

[rppp01]

That's a relief. I am glad to see IE go away, and with it, a large user base that is starting to see other options out there (did you know Netscape still carries meaning with a lot of people?)

So it isn't enough that MS has the OS desktop, web browser, Office Software, 1 of 3 commonly used media types out there....they still want more. damn. Someone needs to take out this 800 lb gorilla, and do it soon. But I get the feeling, only MS can take itself out. The government can't.

Re:Just a side note

[Saxerman]

>But I get the feeling, only MS can take itself out. The government can't.

How about customers?

Those aren't customers, they're hostages and extortion victims. But we still need to convince them that this open source life raft thingy won't sink before they'll jump ship.

Actually it's probably more apt to say they're slaves and we're trying to incite them to overthrow their software overlords. Bolts of lightning from our arse, they can never take our freedom, et cetera.

Re:Just a side note

[ealar dlanvuli]

try phoenix, it's about half the size of NS7 (I'm assuming you are talking about NS7, if it was NS6 then I will agree it sucked ass).

Seriously if you have tried phoenix mozilla1.2b ns7 and ie6 and you still prefer ie6, I would really like to know why.

Re:Just a side note

[hub]

PDF do forms. The only reader I know that support the feature is Adobe's own Acrobat Reader. But this is in the 1.3 spec of PDF.

OpenOffice/StarOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice/StarOffice produce very nice pdf-files, wonder if that has anything to do with it.

Re:OpenOffice/StarOffice

[doublem]

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

Re:OpenOffice/StarOffice

[whereiswaldo]

Microsoft's just pissed that their Switch campaign didn't go as well as Apple's.

Re:OpenOffice/StarOffice

[SCHecklerX]

Well, I don't know how to do this in windoze (I believe it is possible, though), but if your secretary were using a *nix box, you could just create a named pipe that she would print to, the back end being ps2pdf piped to lpr.

End users shouldn't HAVE to be system administrators. Sysadmins should be able to give stuff like the above to their users so they can be *gasp* productive.

Re:OpenOffice/StarOffice

[SCHecklerX]

oops. s/piped to lpr//

Re:OpenOffice/StarOffice

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"unless you take a ps-file and convert that to pdf. That would be to complicated to tell my secretary however."

I've date a few and worked with many who'd be seriously offended at your suggesting they are too dumb to run ps2pdf on a file. My God man, what are your hiring qualifications?

Re:OpenOffice/StarOffice

[morie]

She is definately not dumb. Not very computer savvy either. Just wants things to work quick, rather than have to export to the wrong fileformat (by printing to a printer that doesn't even exsist) and than changing that. So she'll use Adobe writer and import a word file. But she would have wanted the composing and coverting in one application.

Our hiring qualifications are more tuned to organising stuff that at converting fileformats into eachother.

How Typical.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How Typical.

[goggy]

If I understood the ruling correctly then ms are far less likely to be taken to task for any future monopolising. They've basically been told that even though they'll be monitored from now on, the info collected wont be used to prosecute them again.

Re:How Typical.

[commodoresloat]

True that won't be used to prosecute them, but it can now be cited as evidence in any lawsuit brought by any private party, and there's not much they can say back. Thus, even though they got off with a slap on the wrist, the findings of fact in the MS trial could still bury them in the end.

MS must know this, but it wouldn't be the first time they acted arrogantly. Then again, perhaps they would have a plausible argument though that they are hardly monopolizing; they are challenging a nefarious PDF monopoly. But if their moves on Windows break compatibility with Adobe, or make them jump through hurdles to get there, there would I think be clear evidence of them using monopoly power unfairly.

(By the way, the words "challenging a nefarious PDF monopoly" should be delivered in an obnoxious Gates whine)

Monopoly Abuse?

[otisaardvark]

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.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[SgtChaireBourne]

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").

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.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[aqua]

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.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[Mocenigo]

Yes, but people in the american administration is not happy about the "europan" attitude towards the behaviour of an allegedly "free market". The EU stance is that there is no free market if market is allowed to create a monopoly. In physics this is called a singularity, and Microsoft is indeed a kind of black hole. It engulfs everything, and distorts and ultimately breaks what gets near to it. 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...

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[Ig0r]

He didn't say anything about the Democratic Party. Just because the two parties are 'opposed' doesn't mean that they can't both be owned by the same organizations. It's not like the lobbyists don't give equally large amounts to both parties.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[shani]

You're completely right. I have always considered us (europe) to be good allies of the US, but in these absurd times, where the US government is getting almost as bad and rotten as the USSR was in its worst times (Stalin) you can only be glad that we have nukes of our own.

What are you talking about? The USSR invaded countries that tried to implement a political system that it didn't like. Why, it would defend any Middle Eastern country that would ally with it, regardless of the brutality of it's government. And don't forget that they invaded Afghanistan!!!

Um. Never mind.

(To be fair, by most reports Stalin killed 10 million of his own people. He made a secret pact with Hitler to split Poland, and was a real bad guy. I hate George W. as much as the next expat, but let's not get carried away.)

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[slavetrade55]

Look to see Microsoft take on all its U.S. competitors.

Yeah, imagine that. A company taking on its competitors in a capitalist country! Darn them all to heck. There oughtta be a law!

--RMT

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[rnd()]

This may be the drop that washes the U.S. recession into a depression.

I hope you're not serious. Can you please explain to us how having two products that do basically the same thing competing for market share is a bad thing?

Before you start worrying too much about how having a competetor to PDF will kill the economy, think about what will actually happen: 1) Consumers will save money because competition will drive the price of the technology down, and 2) those consumers will have a little extra cash in their pockets that they can use to purchase other goods or buy stock, or just save for a rainy day.

I'm sorry, but I don't think Adobe is the cornerstone of the US economy. If their market for electronic documents (aka PDF) shrinks, then they may have to cut a few jobs or sit down and figure out how to make their product more competetive. Meanwhile, the rest of us are saving money and getting a better product.

BTW, have you looked at the price that Adobe charges for Acrobat (not the reader, which is free)? If you want to use PDF you are paying more for it than the copy of Windowz you're running it on.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[printman]

Yes, but there are plenty of *free* OSS and lower-cost commercial software packages available that allow you to generate PDFs without paying a dime to Adobe.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[Safety Cap]

Consumers will save money because competition will drive the price of the technology down

Um... please explain how something that's free can get any cheaper. Reader is free, and the PDF spec API is open - there are some freeware products that create PDF already.

The danger (as always with things Micro$oft) is that they will embrace, extend, and then exterminate. Witness the web, which is now 99% geared towards IE (which has YET to implement W3C standards).

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[Hal-9001]

Because Microsoft is planning to, and has a good chance of, bludgeoning PDF to death with their overwhelming market share in productivity software, not with the technical merits of their product. If that's not anti-competitive abuse of monopoly power, I don't know what is.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[rnd()]

That stuff happened in the past, and in the recent decision, the judge decided not to split up Microsoft, and narrowly outlined some areas where the company must now behave differently.

So my question is, do you trust the courts to settle the issue? Or do you think that because Microsoft committed its alleged acts that the company should no longer be able to develop new products?

It's one thing to disagree with the decision, but I think all parties should accept the decision that's been hanced down. In light of that, do you still think that Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to develop new products?

My point is, the playing field is what it is. Now that we're effectively beyond the anti-trust issue, at least judicially. What I'm asking is, which of the following describes your thought process:

1. Harping on the decision (Microsoft should have been broken up and Gates should be in jail).

2. Making an emotional appeal against Microsoft because it's "bad".

3. You're ok with the decision, but you don't trust Microsoft to do the right thing in the future.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[MindStalker]

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.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[fudgefactor7]

You're a bit confused. The DOJ loves competition in all aspects of business because then they don't have to get involved. With MS making theis XDocs thing (and not much is really known about it yet) all it does is give Adobe some competition. The inherant instability of the stock market is the reason that Adobe stocks slumped. Someone sneezes and shares of Kleenex go up. That's how it works. Plus keep in mind this will force Adobe to make Acrobat better, and cheaper, so what's the prob? Plus, I know full well that PDF and Adobe aren't going to die over this. And everyone I know says Adobe products are overpriced simply because there are really no alternatives. Well, now there will be. This is a win-win situation for consumers and MS. Adobe just needs to keep up, that's all. Welcome to the marketplace, Adobe.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[TheConfusedOne]

Let's look at your arguments here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

THAT could lead to further damage to the economy as we see how MS prices things once they get control of the market segment.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[4of12]

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.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[afidel]

They give large amounts to both parties but they give larger amounts to the republicans, because idi^H^H^H puppets like George Bush (both of em) are of the old boys club and that much more likely to support big business. Their bought Demorcrats occassionaly wander in order to get reelected.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[rnd()]

It looks like you fell into the trap:

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.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[DickBreath]

Can you please explain to us how having two products that do basically the same thing competing for market share is a bad thing?

I'll give some examples of how competition can be either good or bad for consumers.

Good for consumers:
(depending on your point of view)

• Several different brands of toasters that all accept the same kind of bread, and plug into the same electrical outlet.
• Many different kinds of PC hardware with interchangeable parts.
• Many different software programs that read and write the PDF format. (You can argue about quality of the free ones, but that is entirely beside the point.)

Bad for consumers:
(depending on your point of view, whether or not you have a monopoly on a related technology)

• Several different brands of toasters that only accept Microsoft bread, and only run on Burns brand electricity. (With due respect to Mr. Burns' nuclear plant.)
• Many different kinds of PC hardware all incompatible (Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore 64, Kaypro, Exidy Sorceror, etc....)
• Two different standards for electronic paper. One open, with commercial and freely available software. The other closed, proprietary, encrypted, protected by the DMCA, designed by a monopolist, and only readable on a platform that costs an artificially high price, and only writable from productivity software that costs an artificially high price.

The Microsoft shills can say all they want about how the second set of examples are so good for everyone. Now it is possible that XDoc is just another name for PDF, and Microsoft intends the type of competition illustrated by my first set of examples.

Guessing which type of competition Microsoft intends is an exercise left for the reader. (Hint: you are allowed to examine Microsoft's past behavior to aid you in forming a conclusion. Be sure to explain your reasoning.)

(Extra credit: be the first to point out that I've managed to use "competition" and "Microsoft" in the same sentence!)

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[Dark Fire]

I see Microsoft = U.S. economy mentioned in a lot of posts. IBM's market capitalization is considerably larger than Microsoft's. In fact, a lot of companies have much large market capitalization and much larger revenues then Microsoft. Microsoft stock is tied up into every IRA in the country. A blow to Microsoft would likely collapse a lot of IRAs and expose a lot of funds mis-management and illegal financial activities. That is why so many people are eager to protect Microsoft. A good economy is one where a lot of money changes a lot of hands. A monopoly is opposed to such a process. Microsoft is protected to keep a circus from coming to town that would make Enron look like a mere juggling mime.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[Dun Malg]

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.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[mborland]

I agree that it will be good to have a competitor to PDF. Regardless of what lots of posters seem to think, Adobe has been particularly bad about supporting the creation and display of PDFs. Distiller, which of course can turn print jobs into PDFs, has serious flaws (unstable, inconsistent results, etc.). So serious that when I had to automate PDF creation, I had to go with completely different tools (the best tool out there: FOP, the open-source Jakarta project from our friends at Apache!). FOP always created clean, perfect PDFs, where Distiller was very uneven in its output. Yeah, 3rd party tools are often better than the vendor's solutions, but in this case Adobe still has yet to build a decent API for creating PDFs.

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.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[bluesangria]

The point is that the ruling handed down by Judge CKK would encourage Microsoft to do this with ALL its competitors - not just Adobe and PDF.

Given the ferocious efficiency with which Microsoft undermines the market of other software companies by using its superior financial position to copy their innovations, then tweaking the software to "work best with Windows XXX", I don't think that's an unreasonable concern. But contrary to the previous poster, once Microsoft controls all the software, I tend to think that will encourage more people to try alternatives.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[TheConfusedOne]

Well I'm glad that you can so easily see my motivations for things. Especially since I don't seem to see them as clearly as you do. (Yes, the sarcasm is deliberate.)

There's no trap. I was pointing out the problems with the argument that was put forward.

The point was that the person was talking about how this would be good for consumers because they'd save money. I merely pointed out how completely wrong that argument is. Why? Because the current viewer is free and more importantly the specification for PDF is available for use and implementation by anyone.

Nowhere in my post did I make any "consumers are dumb" argument. You merely throw that up as a straw man to dismiss things.

The point is that MS has been perfectly willing in the past to underprice their products in order to run out the competition. They did this in the early days of office by not having copy protection and giving sweetheart deals to OEM's to bundle it. They did it again with IE (free is definitely underpricing) and they're doing it right now in the streaming media market.

I'm glad you brought up oil vs alternative fuels as it's a great parallel. Why? Because Windows and gasoline enjoy the same infrastructure advantage over all alternatives. Look at how much money we've invested in the infrastructure to ensure that we can fill up our cars at the local gas station. Well, Windows is the same thing. It's a huge infrastructure that many developers are counting on to product the programs that support their livelihood.

What does this all mean? It means that normal competitive market influences aren't effective. You not only have to provide something that's technically superior, it has to be so superior as to be able to supplant this entire infrastructure.

See the ol' chicken and the egg dilemna.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[tassii]

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?

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[rnd()]

Your "bad for consumers" examples assume that consumers are idiots. If it's so bad, why do people keep abusing themselves by buying Microsoft products?

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[fwarren]

"Can you please explain to us how having two products that do basically the same thing competing for market share is a bad thing?"

Sure, glad I could help

Past performance is the best indicator of how something will perform in the future

Look at MicroSofts track record.

• I know we have all benefited from MicroSoft telling PC manufactures that they cannot purchase OEM copies of windows at a discount if "the free market forces" of consumers having a chose to boot multiple OS, preloaded on a machine they purchase.
• Then with a strangle hold on PC"s that are purchased for home and business, a wordprocessor is a must. So let's bundle in at discount MicroSoft Office for OEM's installs. This surely won't hurt wordperfect. Competition is good.
• Let's all shout "Hurray" for the free market, MicroSoft will make a java runtime engine, and we know it will be compatible, because they signed an agreement with Sun.

Need I go on? Need any more examples?

Yes, competiton is good, But when a Monopoly uses it's power to further maintain it as being a monopoly, that is not considered being "competivie" and good for the consumer.

While I will admit that as times change, all monopolies lose that strangehold power (who want's to be railbarron?). In the meantime, with price fixing, genuine invovation being destroyed before it is brought to the market, and new "features" being added, not because they are a benefit to the user, but because they further the interest of the monoploy.

Case in point, when the new version of office comes out, it will only run on Y2k with SP3 or on XP. All news systems will have to be loaded with XP, and the new version office will be the only version available.

At this point, business will end up with a mix of "new office' and "old office", which will not be compatible. They will be forced to upgrade, because it is good for MicroSoft.

If MicroSoft was not a monopoly, abusing it's power, there would be real free market competion, and the consumer could, at cost, swith to different word processor that does not lock them in like that. However, lets face it, as all the MS zelots out there constantly remind us, neither WordPerfect or OpenOffice are viable alternatives for most business that are entrenched MS Office users.

Competition is good (and possible), when you are not competing against a monopoly.

Bart Bucks are not legal tender

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[rnd()]

Isn't Linux and OSS a legitimate alternative?

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[tshak]

XDoc makes perfect sense in Office. It would be silly to force MS to "keep it seperate" because of their "market dominance". This is the same BS logic that would have prevented Dialup Networking, a graphical file browser, and a TCP/IP stack in Windows.

I agree that software should win based on the technical merits of their product, and I don't think that the inclusion of a crappy "portable" document format with Office is going to make everyone switch. However, if Microsoft releases a great format that's _TRUELY_ cross platform and that costs less then ADOBE's overpriced authoring tools, then the consumers have won.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[Oestergaard]

What you really should do is to use PostScript.

Why? Well it's basically what PDF is (PDF was made to be a successor to PS and has some extensions here and there, but let's not get all hung up about that for now).

You can *copy* a PostScript file to any reasonable printer produced in the last 10 years or so. And it will print - correctly and beautifully.

You have excellent interoperability - all UNIX and GNU/Linux systems will work out-of-the-box with PostScript.

For Windows you have "Ghostview" for windows (use google) as an alternative to the Acrobat reader. For printing, well define a standard PostScript printer in windows, and make it print to a file. Set up, for example, an Apple Laserwriter (with Postscript support) and point it to c:\temp\output.ps - voila! There's excellent interoperable standards-conformat PostScript output for you, to share with the world.

Why PDF was made, I never understood. But ok, people seem to use it, and it doesn't *remove* functionality that PostScript has (AFAIK).

xDoc? I see as little need for that, as I did for PDF. PostScript *still* does everything you could possibly want when it comes to simply exchanging pages of film-ready documents.

Both reading and authoring is available for free on any reasonable OS (LaTeX + ghostview) and in Windows (Word/whatever + ghostview/acrobat-something)

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[TheConfusedOne]

So you're trying to tell me that the "hidden cost of downloading, installing, and configuring" is higher than having to up-rev your OS AND up-rev your Office software? That's a good one.

"Adobe Composer" (you mean Acrobat) isn't free. That's true. However, the Portable Document Format (PDF as it's sometimes called) is a freely available specification that anyone can implement in their software.

Now on to XDocs. XDocs is only about forms. There is nothing in the current Office platform that is aimed at creating universally viewable documents. (Though I suppose you can download, install, and configure the Word Viewer, Excel Viewer, and Powerpoint Viewer but you've already pointed out how expensive that is.)

Microsoft will continue to attempt to maximize the profit they get from Office. I'm not going to lose any sleep over this one.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[Safety Cap]

Since discovering TeX (I'm a mathematician, so I really didn't have any choice), I've given up on all other word-processing packages

As well you should :) If I try to use MS's broken implementation of the equation editor (ironically, the TeX version kicks butt), then my file sizes increase exponentially.

For those of you working at home, try this simple exercise: create a simple word document with no less than 20 equations. We'll wait while you go get more memory, a larger hard drive, and incense to keep the anti-BSOD gods appeased.

Oh, my LaTeX document with 20 equations only takes up 5k; if I distill it to PDF, then it is 125k. What makes anyone think that MS's new xDocs will be as compact? More than likely, they will keep up the bloat, which is why professional authors (at least in the sciences) use (La)TeX.

Heck, it is good enough for Donald 'The Art of Computer Programming' Knuth.

Now who's laughing? :)

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[Cassandra]

Why PDF was made, I never understood...

Apparently not everyone has use for the extra features. My favourites are:

• Hyperlinks
• Seach, cut-n-paste etc in acroread.
• Transitions. (You can use acroread as a replacement for PowerPoint)
• Smaller file size

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[DA_MAN_DA_MYTH]

I think the one thing people will realize with XDocs, is that corporations aren't exactly knocking down walls to fit in the new office products. Finally managers are asking why do I need to authroize this purchase we already have office 97, 2000. Why do I need smart Tags or XDocs, when I have Adobe PDF writer and I don't know what I need smart tags for.

Microsoft obviously will always be around but I don't think their software sales will truly be as dominate as they were the past decade. Most of the Windows OS upgrades I have seen lately, come in the form of a new PC.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[InnovATIONS]

So Adobe controls a specification, has huge market share, uses it to charge a premium for their Acrobat Authoring Tools and it is good?

Acrobat is, at least was at the start, just an encapsulation of Postscript.

If Microsoft's specification for XDocs is open, freely available, based on XML, easily implemented, and has a better structured design then all for it. If Adobe then has to reduce the price of Acrobat Authoring tools or make authoring tools that can support multiple formats I certainly won't be crying about it.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[rnd()]

Sounds like the linux community needs to hire some salespeople and a marketing department!

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[ProfDumb]

If it's free, then why does anyone care what Microsoft does?

The problem is Monopoly plus network effects. And the argument doesn't rely on consumers being dumb. (I have a Ph.D. in Economics, by the way.)

Here is why I care what MS does with file formats, including possible competitors to PDF. Many folks want to use Office. Fine. MS bundles a new file format with office. OK. Now they send the files to me. Uh-oh. I am now either a jerk who makes them send files in a different format or else I just give in and buy Office myself (this is the network effect.) I pay $800 not because I like the software, but because I need to work with those who use Office.

Now I am one less customer for Adobe and the network effect is bigger (because of the folks who now have to share files with me.) And the kicker: with demand dropping, Adobe goes out of business, the PDF file format is no longer improved. Demand for Office increases and MS, not being stupid, raises the price of Office.

Almost everyone, except MS, is now worse off as compared to the situation where we had a "open" file format.

So, do you understand the argument now? No consumer was being stupid, as you claim and yet all the consumers are worse off. This is standard graduate-level network economics, it is not like I am making it up as I go along.

Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[rnd()]

I agree with & understand everything you've said about network economics. The point I was making was that there is a difference between Microsoft the alleged monopolist and Microsoft the beneficiary of network economies.

Because of the way network economies work, there will naturally be a tendancy for people to standardize on a particular platform.

Sure, it would be nice if Microsoft used only 100% standardized file formats (*note, this is the one thing that the courts should have done to Microsoft, in my opinion). But the formats are not being arbitrarily changed, and to take the Office example, each version of Office is capabable both of reading and writing any of the earlier Microsoft file format standards.

People save their documents in the newer formats because they're better. Picture a two-pan balance with "better" on one side and "standard" on the other. In the case of Microsoft Office file formats, the consuming public has tipped the balance toward "better".

PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[ruckc]

XDocs are based around the XML specification. Hence, wouldn't they be easily modifiable?

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[nizo]

The question is, will Microsoft invent their own "standard" brand of XML. I suppose they could follow the XML spec, but then again I don't hear any pigs flying overhead at the moment.....

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[sql*kitten]

XDocs are based around the XML specification. Hence, wouldn't they be easily modifiable?

Let me just see if I understand Slashdot's position on all of this:

• 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
  

So my question to the Slashbots is, will you criticize everything Microsoft does - even if it's something you wanted them to do - just because it's Microsoft? Or is there a serious technical reason that this product is inferior?

Because, y'know, the best product should always get the support of the market. That's why Excel is so popular.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[khuber]

Just because you use XML doesn't mean that your format is open/accessible. XML is just a low level file format that requires a language to be useful. I mean binary is an open format because all computers understand 1s and 0s right? No...

PDF isn't a very good format either because Adobe controls the spec. It isn't open.

Looking at Microsoft's XDocs FAQ since I can't get to the article, it appears to be geared primarily towards creating forms so it's not obvious how it competes directly. I never liked PDF forms and they seems to be used rarely.

The evilness of XDocs depends on whether you will be able to easily use them without Office. PDF has wide support on many platforms.

-Kevin

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[rant-mode-on]

• Because, y'know, the best product should always get the support of the market. That's why Excel is so popular.

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?

I think you'll find that Microsoft ensured that the "best product" never got made, because they knew it wouldn't be theirs.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[Nerant]

One. Slashdot is a forum, not a united voice.

Two. XML is good, because it's a format that parsers have been written for, so developers don't have to write yet another file format parser, but merely write some additional logic ontop of an existing XML parser.

Three. Microsoft using XML isn't bad. However, given the history of their actions with regards to standards, and common sense, it is highly probable they'll find some way to subvert XML into some bizarre format that only MS Office can handle. This is what some of us at Slashdot feel will happen. XML isn't bad, but Microsoft doesn't have a track record for following standards. They do however, have the high score for subverting them.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[DF5JT]

| * 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.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[pubjames]

Let me just see if I understand Slashdot's position on all of this:
[..]
Now Microsoft want to use XML too... but that's also bad

It's simple. The people who post to Slashdot generally don't trust Microsoft. And they've good reason not to. Even when they say they are using a particular format, they deliberately do stuff to make it incompatible with anything that isn't from Microsoft.

Try this simple test. Open a document in Microsoft Word 2000. Save as HTML. Look at the HTML. You will find yourself looking at something that is unlike any other HTML you'll ever come across.

So when Microsoft say that XDocs is in XML format, it doesn't really mean it will be in XML format, just something they themselves call XML format.

Microsoft hasn't done anything recently that has convinced me that I can trust what they say. So I don't. The mistrust runs so deep that I, and I expect may other people who post on Slashdot, will be absolutely amazed if we open an XDoc and see something like this:

<title style="heading1">This is a title</title>

rather than (and this is a small extract from a very simple document in Word 2000 saved as "html"):

<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:data>08D0C9EA79F9BACE118C8200AA004BA90B02000000 080000000D0000005F0054006F006300320034003200350038 003400330031000000</w:data>
</xml><![endif]--></s pan><!--[if supportFields]><span style='color:windowtext;
display:none;mso-hide:sc reen;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><sp an
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><! [endif]--></a></span><o:p></o:p></p&g t ;

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[e8johan]

If nothing else, they'll still f**k up the format by adding links to ActiveX components etc. so that you'll need to have Office installed to view properly.

What is wrong with a plain old PS, you can even embed EPS files into PS files. Has always worked, will always work. I use Framemaker + xfig + matlab for my documents, and this far, I've never had any problems. As for PS portability, that's what ps2pdf is for :)

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[larien]

I believe the saying goes:

Microsoft follow standards the same way fish follow migrating caribou

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[Erik Hollensbe]

Because, y'know, the best product should always get the support of the market. That's why Excel is so popular.

Do you know what the terms 'subjective' and 'ad hoc' mean?

Excel is the most popular program, and therefore superior because of it's support -- yet I know a good portion of people who, because they don't know how to use tables in Word, use excel to forma t documents.

Then again, how often do you hear of:

1) A user installing multiple office suites on thier machine (especially in a corporate environment where the bottom line is essential), because they actually want the "best" word processor, the "best" spreadsheet, etc?

or,

2) A user installing a single office suite on their machine, and then installing a competing standalone product (a dated example: lotus) because it's superior?

or,

3) A company doing a mass-retraining effort of all of their employees to use a different office suite?

There is no "best" product. Support and Knowledge is all that matters.

We have a guy at work who is pushing Ocaml to work on a web project we need. Ocaml, IMO, is a superior language in many regards to what we currently use (although I have issues with the syntax.... at least lisp has more than indentation to visually support scope :), but this is the question that everyone keeps asking:

"Who's going to maintain this after this guy leaves?"

The point is, is finding people who know word and excel is easy. If you don't use that software, you're probably going to have a period of retraining.

Retraining costs people money and time, one way or another.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[guybarr]

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.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[grahamlee]

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.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[OpenSourced]

Exactly. There is noting sacred or intrinsecaly open about XML. It's in fact a very broad standard, allowing almost anything. You could define a format based on it that was as indecipherable as any based on binary data.

More to the point is... will the standard be open? I guess not. If it's open then let it fight, by all means, on pure merit with PDF, and let the better format win.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[g4dget]

Or is there a serious technical reason that this product is inferior?

Nobody knows yet. An XML-based forms handling system has to be better than the garbage Microsoft is shipping right now with Microsoft Word. However, there are still plenty of opportunities for Microsoft to (1) screw up technically, and (2) make the stuff proprietary ("Your XML checks in, but it never checks out.").

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[mjpaci]

You can embed Embedded Post Script files into Post Script files?

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[joshua404]

So my question to the Slashbots is, will you criticize everything Microsoft does - even if it's something you wanted them to do - just because it's Microsoft? Or is there a serious technical reason that this product is inferior?

Not to mention the irony of the Slashbots rallying around Adobe, the company responsible for having Dmitry tossed into prison.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[Rogerborg]

Ouch. Has that got worse since Word '97 then? I get this for a one line file, first in Word '97:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">
<TITLE>The quick brown fox leapt over the lazy dog</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>

<FO NT SIZE=2><P>The quick brown fox leapt over the lazy dog.</P></FONT></BODY>
</HTML& g t;

Then in Open Office 1.0.1:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<TITLE></TITLE>
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 (Win32)">
<META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20021105;13015155">
<META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20021105;13030129">
<STYLE>
<!--
@page { margin: 2cm }
-->
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY LANG="en-US">
<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman, serif">The
quick brown fox leapt over the lazy dog.</FONT></P>
</BODY>
</HTML&g t ;

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.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[eyeball]

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 latter. My job is easier because I don't have to ask if any of the 200 people I come into contact with at work has a spreadsheet installed that's compatible with the one I use (*). 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. Think of it: Office is a critical part of my businesss, and it's still cheaper than a computer. That's a bargain to me.

(*) And don't give me any of that "Oh but open non-proprietary standards could solve that" crap. Design-by-committee standards will always lag behind desired features while people waste time agreeing on an implementation.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[mgibbs]

:-) Sorry, this just reminded me of a Simpson's quote:

Shop Owner: We sell forbidden objects from places men fear to tread. We also sell frozen yogurt, which I call "Frogurt"!
Homer tells the owner that he is looking for a present for his son's birthday. The owner hands him a talking Krusty doll.
Shop Owner: Take this object, but beware it carries a terrible curse!
Homer: [worried] Ooooh, that's bad.
Shop Owner: But it comes with a free Frogurt!
Homer: [relieved] That's good.
Shop Owner: The Frogurt is also cursed.
Homer: [worried] That's bad.
Shop Owner: But you get your choice of topping!
Homer: [relieved] That's good.
Shop Owner: The toppings contains Potassium Benzoate.
Homer: [stares]
Shop Owner: That's bad.
Homer: Can I go now?

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[arkanes]

Well, the simple answer is that if you're going to write a simple document that doesn't need formatting information, don't use a file format that embedds assloads of formatting information :P That said, I think this whole use of "XML for everything" is a huge, moronic pain in the ass. As other posters have said, there's nothing open about XML unless you also have DTD, and the overhead from converting everything into tags and charsets instead of binary data is immenese, to say nothing of the programmatic overhead of embedding an XML parser in everything (or more than one, if you need to support more than one version of the standard, since it's still not finalized). And the network overhead of translating binary data and function calls to XML so you can pipe them over HTTP. Aarg. *hate*

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[Skapare]

Two. XML is good, because it's a format that parsers have been written for, so developers don't have to write yet another file format parser, but merely write some additional logic ontop of an existing XML parser.

I haven't found a universal XML parser, yet, that doesn't suck (callbacks are evil). I use EXPAT right now only because it sucks less than the others. But even it will crash and burn on pieces of XML it doesn't understand. Apparently one of the concepts of XML, specifically to die when anything even remotely hints at being not quite right, totally contradicts the concept of robustness.

Three. Microsoft using XML isn't bad. However, given the history of their actions with regards to standards, and common sense, it is highly probable they'll find some way to subvert XML into some bizarre format that only MS Office can handle. This is what some of us at Slashdot feel will happen. XML isn't bad, but Microsoft doesn't have a track record for following standards. They do however, have the high score for subverting them.

XML by itself is usless. It's simply (but really, it isn't simple at all, just look at the documentation while trying to write a parser) a syntax that provides for attaching tags and data to documents. You still have to have something that applies semantics. The problem is that the fuzzy boundary between syntax and semantics results in things breaking when unknown stuff is present (at least HTML didn't do that). It's been suggested that XML was created as this big obscure technological honeypot just to eventually snare and entrap Microsoft. Maybe it is doing the job intended.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[pjrc]

If PDF isn't an open format, then how did Derek Noonburg create XPDF, a free (GPL) PDF viewer for unix/X11 that works well on almost all PDF files, even ones with encryption.

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).

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[Midnight Thunder]

Because of the past and current history of Microsoft everyone has knee-jerk reaction to condone anything they do. I am not a big MS fan myself, but sometimes you just have to wait and see. Just because an enitity can be perceived as being bad, it doesn't stop them from doing things that are out of character.

Two good things that have come out from MS are SOAP (XML over RPC) and RTF.

A PDF style document in XML is a good thing as in theory it makes a more understandable document format than the current PDF format. If it supports SVG, then it will be an good bonus.

The ultimate fear is that Microsoft will make a brilliant alternative to PDF, but you will have to pay for the specs, though in theory this shouldn't be too much of an issue as the XSL should be published to verify the integrity of XDoc documents. Lacking XSL or specs you could reverse engineer the format, though avoid doing this in the USA, because of the DMCA. Though until XDoc is released all this is all speculative FUD.

PDF has the lead, though how much XDoc makes up for the late start is yet to be seen. BTW there is nothing stopping Adobe from releasing their PDF printer driver for free.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[DrXym]

It would be very straightforward to produce an XML format which is all but unintelligible even if it is visible.

For proof, just take a look at the likes of chrome or RDF to see how unintelligible open formats are. Even with the specs in front of you, it takes a good while to understand the nuances. Now imagine if MS invented their own office format and never bothered to document how it was specified, threw in other crap such as data islands, bizarre entities, binary encoded data, mix and match namespaces and other wackiness and no one would have the first clue how to do anything useful with it. Sure it could be parsed because its XML, but what good is that if you don't know what you're parsing?

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[Shelled]

Because, y'know, the best product should always get the support of the market. That's why Excel is so popular.

By that logic McDonalds makes the world's best food, the Chevy Vega was once the world's best car and Happy Days the world's best television. In what sense are you using the word 'best'?

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[jbolden]

It wasn't so much better as better value, i.e. price. AmiPro was generally considered better than Word for Windows or WordPerfect for Windows. Excel was slightly better than Lotus 1-2-3 or QuatroPro. Harvard Graphics was much better than PowerPoint.... The difference was price:
spreadsheets and wordprocessors retailed for $495
databases and presentation software retailed for $595.

Microsoft brought out the "competitive upgrade" pricing of $129. At first no one wanted to match this price and Microsoft bought itself the home / small business market during a period of rapid growth for PC in office environments. Later the office bundles came. Neither Lotus nor Wordperfect cut their prices the same way until much later; they finally did but by then Microsoft had gone through another upgrade to their product while Lotus and Wordperfect hadn't (look at the lack of difference between Ami 2 and Ami 3 for example).

To this day its hard to argue the Microsoft extend office:
Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio, Project, Outlook, Access... is not the best office suite on the market by far.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[spiro_killglance]

Don't start me on SOAP. Dumhead idea. You got
one computer converting the data it sends to
a (not quite) human readible XML format, and then the other computer has to convert it back at the far end.

SOAP because CORBA just isn't slow enough.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[tshak]

Or is it because Microsoft crushed the opposition by exploiting their monopoly?


What monopoly? You act as if Microsoft has always had this magical monopoly since the beginning of time. When I worked at Software Etc. in early 93, I remember selling an almost equal amount of Lotus and Word Perfect. I hadn't even used Microsoft Office until 96, and to this day I've never installed it on my personal machine. Nevertheless, I remember that both Wordperfect and Lotus products were very poor at competing on price (they were usually 20-30% more expensive then MS products), and eventually the price/performance ratio of MS's software won.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[jafuser]

PDF is a crufty file format. Insert one byte and you have to go modify the object table. Ugh... So there's no quick and elegant way to work with PDFs.

At least with an XML format (assuming everything's not encoded and/or encrypted), I can insert an extra word into the document using vi.

Now if they just use XML as a buzzword encapsulator and base64 encode everything into one big XML chunk, then it's time to put on the flamethrowers...

:wq

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[tshak]

Which DTD's are proprietary? Because so far, everything in .NET (XML configs, etc.) is open. We'll soon see about Office.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[flacco]

When I worked at Software Etc. in early 93, I remember selling an almost equal amount of Lotus and Word Perfect.

I think MS-Office became more popular because it didn't have that incredible-pain-in-the-ass "lock file" anti-piracy feature that Lotus used.

Quite interesting that MS has now gone completely in the other direction with mandatory activation, and one of the advantages of Free / open source is that you don't have to worry about per-copy license restrictions.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[Degrees]

Regarding Microsoft's monopoly, I remember the MS DOS 3.30 to 3.31 upgrade action. Microsoft shipped an upgrade to DOS to specifically break Lotus 1-2-3 under Windows. At the same time, they were running print advertisements with the message 'If you want the programs that run best in Windows, you should buy your programs from the maker of Windows'. So the new machine came in, we installed Lotus, copied all of the accountant's spreadsheets onto it, and when we cranked up 1-2-3, Windows spit out an error 'Program LOTUS has violated system integrity' blah blah blah.

Infoworld took Microsoft to task for shipping an upgrade that broke the (then) most popular program in the world ("Didn't you do any testing?" "Yes, we knew there would be problems"). It was particularly onerous as the "upgrade" was not optional. Microsoft just shipped the new code to all its OEM partners and said 'it is the new version - pre-install it instead of the old version'. So every new PC from HP, Compaq, Dell (PC's Limited), Toshiba, etc. came with the Lotus breaker OS.

I am not sure that people saw Excel as better, as much as they saw Lotus as trouble.

Our accountants had these massive spreadsheets that took ten minutes to calculate - and our first tests with Excel took 20% longer. Later, we actually became Quattro Pro users, as it had more features than Excel.

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.

[Felinoid]

Microsoft has a significantly bad history with "open" standards.

First they'd use the open standard.
(Horray Microsoft supports a standard)
Then the extend it a tad
(Why bother it won't be portable. Feh well the standards still there just ignore the extention)
(Hay your file is broken) (No it's not it works on Windows) (But it dosen't work on Linux/Mac/Amiga/Anything else) (Not my falt your system is defective. It runs fine on Windows so it's fine.)

Then they break the standard forcing use of the extentions
(Well we have thies extentions to make up for the defect for now and Microsoft will fix it)
years later
(Some day)

In short it ceases to be a portable standard and becomes Microsofts newest propriarty format.

Back in the day people complained when Wordstar added a few features to txt creating it's own wordprocessing file format.
It wasn't hard to use Wordstar for standard text plus it included an "export to text" to strip the features.

Now people pritty much accept it when Microsoft Word saves files as .doc when it's not even remotely compatable with text.

(Historicly .doc and .txt files are text files. .doc stands for documents such as user manuals etc)

In short we'd like Microsoft to actually use and STAY WITH standards but we know they won't.
So we'd prefer Microsoft just not do it at all and leave the standards to others even if they are closed like PDF.

Nah

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Nah

[commodoresloat]

Also OS X relies heavily on PDF. So dealing with PDF is a breeze on OS X; printing to pdf from any application is a no-brainer. I'm not sure how this fits into their plans, but MS-PDF will probably run like crap on OS X, at least for a while.

Re:Nah

[LWATCDR]

An XML based document format could be better than PDF. From what I see PDF is not that easy to extract data from with a program.
XML on the other had could be very easy to extract and or write.
IF it is open it could be a good solution all the way around. I am sure good programers on the Open Office project and Mozilla will add support faster than anyone expects.

My question is where is Open Office for the Mac? I want one office suit for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Re:Nah

[k_187]

Its out there, but to use it right now, you have to install XDarwin and XonX, so I don't really consider it to be at the same level as the other platforms. They're working on a cocca version(I think its cocca anyway), but lord only knows when that will come out.

Re:Nah

[alfredo]

Until then, Appleworks is fine with me.

If I want a PDF, Print/Save As PDF works very well.

Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[mrpuffypants]

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...

Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[evilviper]

Acrobat is one of the best file ideas out there

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.

Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[rnd()]

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.

Uhmmm... have you forgotten that most (normal, non-geek) people still called any web browser "Netscape" until about 1999???

Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[mrpuffypants]

never at all...any non geek people that I've been around usually just it call it "The Internet" or in the case of my mom: "www" ...sigh...

Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[rnd()]

There was a period of time (pre IE4 in software time) when any web browser was "Netscape" to the masses. I was there, I saw it.

Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[elvum]

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.

That's the whole point of Acrobat - it's designed to replace printing out hardcopies, so editing is limited to the kind of thing you'd do with a bottle of tipp-ex. You're not supposed to delete the original document when you make the pdf...

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.

What about cryptographic signing? Portable font embedding? Exact cross-platform reproduction on screen and in hard copy? PDF documents are good enough to send straight to press; html was designed for a completely different purpose (*reasonable* reproduction on a variety of user agents).

Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[ConceptJunkie]

Monopoly or no, Microsoft beat them at their own game. Did MS abuse its monopoly? Yes, in many ways. Was IE objectively better than Netscape? Yes, eventually. Should IE have won over NS, yes, but because it was better, not because Microsoft cheats.

IE 1.0 and 2.0 were lame. IE 3.0 was catching up with NS 3.x. IE 4 exceeded Netscape, IMO, and NS 4.0 was a huge bloated mess, that was usable, but didn't add anything worth the bloat (again IMO). NS 6 might have been based on Mozilla, but they certainly didn't learn any lessons about bloat.

I'd use Mozilla on Windows, but the darn thing to too slow (it responds like it's swapping hundreds of megs to disk), so while it works great and has some features that are much better than IE, I'm still using IE.

Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[evilviper]

Yes it does, but HTML would be a better solution, IMHO. It would be nice to be able to stick it on a webserver, and have your brower open it, rather than a seperate app. Of course, if some browsers start getting OpenOffice format compatibility, that would be just as good.

Odditionally, OpenOffice is not very popular as of yet, and it really isn't cross platform. By that, I mean the same files will not look identical across different platforms.

Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[evilviper]

Exact cross-platform reproduction on screen and in hard copy?
It's not difficult. HTML can put any object within a pixel of where you want it.

Fonts & signing is something that HTML doesn't have now, but that's part of the idea behind creating an archive format. In there you could stick fonts, signatures, etc.

Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now

[evilviper]

You can't view a Postscrit in acrobat simply because Adobe doesn't want you to. It would be trivial for them to add that functionality.

Umm...

[Black Perl]

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.

Re:Umm...

[G-funk]

SSSHHHH! Don't spoil the slashdot fud tantrum! Geeze, next you'll be saying you can turn off palladium, and that you don't _have_ to listen to celine dion, even if you own a mac.

Re:Umm...

[selectspec]

Not to mention this is a good thing, because with xdocs MS is porting their MS Word.doc format to XML which will greatly increase interoperability on word docs.

Re:Umm...

[Raphael]

selectspec wrote:

with xdocs MS is porting their MS Word.doc format to XML which will greatly increase interoperability on word docs

This conclusion is unfortunately wrong. XML code can be just as proprietary as any binary code, unless the corresponding Schema or DTD is published together with good instructions describing how to use it. Without this, then having XML or having some unstructured binary file does not make a big difference, except for the fact that the XML code is human-readable (readable does not mean understandable).

XML can help the interoperability between products, to some extent. But only if the DTDs are public so that the meaning of the XML code can be decyphered.

Note that there are already a number of MS Word import/export filters that are not too bad, despite the fact that the file format is binary (or RTF) and the specs are not published. I do not think that XML will help them in any way. On the contrary, one could think that this radical change in file format may just be another way to delay the competition.

That was a fast /.

[Rubbersoul]

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?

Re:That was a fast /.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:That was a fast /.

[Rubbersoul]

Well if this is indeed the case it still sound a bit like Adobe's newest PDF tools that allow a user to modify online pdf forms with out having to buy the over priced full version of Adobe's software.

Yes, but...

[melonman]

...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...

Re:Yes, but...

[Per Wigren]

...surely the issue is not whether or not it's Microsoft,

No, it's about how open it is, if it's portable, patented, if 3rd parties can implement it, and things like that.

but whether or not the technology actually works.

If it's not portable I can't use it.
If it's not open, Free Software developers can't implement it in the programs I use.
Then it's not working. Not for me at least.

Re:Yes, but...

[melonman]

I don't think so. Word is pretty ubiquitous, Wordpad will produce Word-compatible files, but I don't see many Word files posted on professional web sites, compared with PDF files.

Apart from the intrinsic merits of the two formats, one reason might be that Adobe provides server-side software for churning out PDF on various platforms, including Linux. If Xdocs doesn't have a un*x-compatible server program, it isn't going to appear on db-driven Apache-hosted sites much.

Re:Yes, but...

[Per Wigren]

Ghostscript is free in the "speech" sense...

Re:Yes, but...

[Stary]

Is PDF 'free' in the free beer sense?

Yes. From the PDF specification:

Adobe gives permission to anyone to:

• Prepare files in which the file content conforms to the Portable Document Format.
• Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable Document Format.
• Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format and displays the results, prints the results, or otherwise interprets a file represented in the Portable Document Format.
• Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of operators and data structures, as well as the PDF sample code and PostScript language Function definitions in the written specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document Format for the above purposes.

Cache

[Squeamish Ossifrage]

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.

That'll be the day

[Quila]

When designers trust a Microsoft product to get their high-end print jobs to the printer.

About time

[sasquatchoflove]

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.

Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?

[foniksonik]

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).

Re:Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?

[fishnuts]

It will be a PDF Killer when they include it in every single MS product. IIS will have modules to generate and process them on-the-fly, IE7 will have the Viewer, Office will have the Publisher, Exchange will have its own interface, of course, and since they'll certainly be wrapping it in a layer of DRM, the DMCA will prevent anyone from reverse-engineering it to produce a compatible Viewer for NS/Moz/Konq/Opera/Lynx or *insert-your-non-MS-OS-here*.

And since this idea wasn't mentioned at all during the DOJ Antitrust trials, DOJ probably wont bother touching it.

Re:Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?

[constantnormal]

One can hope for some typical misguided "innovation" from Mr Bill's hordes of zombie coders -- something that sounds good on the face of it, but only increases the document size and makes it less usable by anything other than Office.

Something like embedding multiple languages into the document via XML tagsets. All you would have to do is select the language to be viewed via the appropriate Office preference setting, and voila!

Of course, the next step (and that's the one where someone should be saying "Sure, we CAN do this, but SHOULD we?") is automatic software translation so that each time a document is created, translations of it spanning the range from Algerian to Zulu are embedded within the document framework. You knew there was a good use for 200G hard drives, right? And with all the fun Microsoft has had with foreign spelling dictionaries over the years, one would expect that they've learned their lesson about doing quality work with language translation...

Re:Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?

[Bodrius]

For most users, PDF is a read-only format. They don't need to publish to PDF. Usually, they can't.

For them, MSOffice-formats are already the default and nothing is going to change that. This includes most intra-office file exchange.

And yet, PDF has met a particular need to the point where it is the standard publishing format. The people publishing to it USUALLY know a bit of what they're doing and are publishing to PDF (rather than Word2K) for a reason.

For them it's not going to be "killed" unless the alternative:
I- Is at least as functional as PDF (for their needs).
II- Can interoperate with PDF (convert back-and-forth) so that they don't lose their previous work.
III- Is as "universal" as PDF (platform-wise).
IV- The transition cost is low, or nil.

This points to an "open" standard (II, III, IV) with a cheap set of commercial tools (I, IV) and direct export support on commercial applications (IV).

In other words, to be a "killer" it has to be able to compete with PDF in the first place. It has to be either better, or cheaper, and probably both.

Re:Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?

[Bodrius]

You neglected the main point of my comment: the user demographics are different. For Average Joes, PDF is a read-only format, and it's not the Average Joes that Microsoft has to convert, it's the content producers.

Perhaps you might compare this to the effect that MS Internet Explorer "extensions" had on HTML, but that would require "embracing" PDF in order to "extend" it (and provide a default viewer for the "extensions").

This is no such case.

As a side note:

As a long-time Netscape user I'd say that is correct anyway.

Netscape didn't leave my computer until Internet Explorer became a better browser. Only recently has it returned.

Yes, Microsoft played dirty. Yes, it integrated Internet Explorer with the OS awfully. Yet Netscape 4.x was so bad that I preferred Internet Explorer IN SPITE of its integration (and the "browser crashes the computer for no reason" part).

Re:Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?

[Bodrius]

You don't get it still. In order to replace PDF, it would still have to be able to compete with PDF in the eyes of the users.

You want a client application that views a document format in every PC? You already have it. If you have Windows, click on that blue "e" somewhere in the desktop.

Microsoft has integrated at different points RTF, Word format, Internet Explorer (and its own brand of HTML/XHTML and ActiveX), etc. into the OS.

Most of the document producers are still using MS Office to create these documents (remember that whole monopoly thing?) and using the native format for internal consumption. That's why they need products to export these documents to PDF.

Why would they use PDF instead, imposing the burden on their users of downloading and installing Acrobat, etc? Simply because they need what PDF provides as a document format. They need it so badly that it has become a necessity.

Anything that competes with PDF would have to provide the useful features of PDF, otherwise it won't succeed. The "everyone is using it" won't work because "everyone is using already PDF too, and it actually works" will be the response.

If MS hopes that the users would accept a merely adequate product for a lower price ("gratis"), they're probably right. MS may want to sacrifice profit and give it away to get market share if they want, but they'll also have to deliver a decent product in the process.

The fact that there's already a legacy investment, that transparency and openness are currently valued features of the PDF product, means that it will be forced to "open" its alternative to compete (in the same sense, and with the same quote-unquote, that it had to do with .NET to compete with Java).

Is that really so bad?

Consider that PDF is useful mostly because the other document formats are useless. If Microsoft provides a decent replacement integrated with Office, I would see it as fixing an incomplete product.

On the sidenote:

Of course they played dirty, just read the conclusions of the anti-trust judge. MS hid API's from Netscape so their software wasn't as good.

---

And I assume that's what stopped Opera and other companies from developing better products?

Is that why Netscape crashed even more than Internet Explorer, in spite of it being a simpler, less integrated (and therefore less interacted with) product?

Microsoft may have unfairly given advantage to its product, and there are competitors in the market which would have fared better otherwise, but Netscape sucked by its own efforts.

Re:Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?

[Bodrius]

Ok, let's say some other company, let's call it "Company Z" decides to create a competitor to the PDF format. It's completely open, the software to create PDF files is free. But wait, how are they going to spread their viewing application code to users? Oh no! They can't! In theory you would like to say "This is the best product out there so people will use it." So Company Z puts it on the web but no one downloads it.. even though it's the best product! Heaven forbid!
----

Let's give Z an interesting name in the experiment... hmm... yes, let's call it, Adobe. And let's call the product "PDF", the viewer "Acrobat" and force everyone who wants to read it to download the free reader from the then awfully slow Internet...

Yes, of course this business model could never work.

----

So in other words, Microsoft is using its momentum in the OS market in order to provide a competing product to users. It may be nice, but what about the even better products which don't have the luxury of bundling software with the OS?

----

This invites a couple of questions which are at the root the same:

I) As a consumer, WHY DO I CARE about the "poor products" ?
II) IF these products are so much better, IN WHAT SENSE?

A product is only "better" if it is a better match for the needs of the customer. If, from the point of view of the consumer the products are equivalent, the consumer doesn't care about what happens to the non-preferred product. Nor should he/she care.

Yet another example (actually, the same I've been using for other things here): the OS comes integrated with a free, fully functional HTML document viewer. Hey, it even includes scripting capabilities, or the ability to run full Java applications if I want. There's even a pletorah of free/cheap HTML authoring tools to design my documents. It's free, and it's everywhere!

Why would I, the consumer, ever look for a non-integrated, expensive solution for my documents?

Personally, I rarely do. 99% of the time, for me typical document creation (Word/Powerpoint) is functionally equivalent to HTML, and so I use HTML.

But I'm not a typical case. For the typical case, HTML is wholly inadequate for their documents, and they need MSOffice, OpenOffice, StarOffice or whatever they choose. They pay the money, install the gigabytes of software, run the bloated thing and produce... a memo.

Word could be technologically speaking more complete than any HTML authoring tool, but from my point of view it suffers of "featuritis". From the point of view of the typical Office user, HTML lacks crucial features. From the point of view of the typical publisher, BOTH technologies are completely inadequate.

The point is that "better product", functionally speaking, is mostly decided by the consumer according to their needs, and it usually means that which satisfies their minimum requrirements for the minimal price with the minimal effort.

If they can make do with Office they don't care about PDF. If they can do with HTML they don't care about Office products. If they can do with Explorer they don't care about Netscape.

Why should they? A personal hovercraft would be really nice, superior technology, but why should I have to pay 200K for one if I can happily make do with a car?

----

Better product? Hmm, I seem to remember Microsoft rushing IE out the door and creating an extremely buggy product.. In fact both were equally buggy.
---

You are both correct and incorrect.

Internet Explorer 1-3 was a rushed piece of crap. It was even buggier than Netscape, messy, and lacking features.

Also, it was not integrated with the OS in any way, and it was tremendously unpopular. Nobody used it.

Internet Explorer 4 came tightly integrated with the Win98 OS, quickly became very popular, and is considered in general to be Netscape's "killer".

It was also a well-featured, polished product. Much, much more stable than Netscape, in spite of being a more complicated product tightly coupled with the OS.

Since this is the one that took the market share from Netscape, and this is the one that is considered an anti-competitive case, versions 1-3 are as irrelevant to the discussion as they were to the market.

---
And may have played unfairly? No, it's a fact that they did play unfairly
---

You seem to be unfamiliar with certain expressions of the English language. Expressions of the form "Subject X MAY have done Y, but Z is still true" are used not to question the validity of Y, but to point out that the result Z is not affected by whether it's true or not.

Re:Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?

[Bodrius]

Amazing that a company like Adobe could have pulled this off! Must have been a really good product in that they didn't have control over the OS so they couldn't bundle any program and spread it that way. It had to be truly a great product. If the OS manufacturer had pushed their own version, one might say "Hmm, but what about other products out there?" Here we have an independent third party coming up with their own product and it was succesful. This is a good thing.

----

I'm assuming that you're being sarcastic, but just in case: no, it's not amazing. The product was sorely needed. As was Netscape at its time.

The fact that Adobe has the resources to market their product and eagerly did so helps too.

----

Wow, Microsoft is so good and caring to everyone. They have decided on a better standard, and will ship the client software to everyone, all because it's better for them! God bless Bill Gates. They have, once again, decided on software that is good for us and we will see that it's a great product and adopt it. Amazing, and the fact that Microsoft controls the OS market has nothing to do with the proliferation of xdocs. Nothing at all. Not one bit.

----

The market is not about morals, it's not about "good" and not about "bad". "Great products" are defined by customer satisfaction and the availability of other offers.

It's the customers who decide that using the cheap/free, less complete product is better for them overall. It's them who decide whether to pay for an antivirus, a terminal emulator, an http browser or a web server if it's sound business to them.

In order to make it sound business for the customers, Microsoft is forced to at least satisfy their basic needs. The proliferation of an alternative is impossible if the product cannot compete by itself... the monopoly is an unfair advantage to the product, but it doesn't MAKE the product.

-----

This is very true. Microsoft provides everyone with very cheap products. Of course they do have an illegal monopoly as determined by the court. And, if you studied economics, this means that their market is a cash cow for them. They can easily offer cheaper products and beat out competitors this way. IE is cheaper than netscape, same with xdocs. This is what's great about a monopoly, you reap the benefits of the monopoly by jacking up prices(this was established in court) then provide cheap if not free products/services to rid yourself of competition ie keeping a monopoly. You're exactly right. The consumer is getting a free and adequate product. At the same time, other companies are not allowed to innovate. Microsoft can innovate within the windows market, but others cannot because Microsoft controls what is / what is not bundled.

----

Anyone who has studied economics knows that monopolies are not that simple to classify as evil, nor that simple to dissolve. Their effects are more confusing and subtle, particularly when it comes to prove that the consumers have been effectively harmed (which is the only thing that matters in monopoly regulation).

Monopolies are centralizations of economic power, and their respective problems and advantages are the same of a government-based centralized economy: the monopoly regulates the market, consciously or unconsciously. Of course, they have a strong motivation to do so consciously in spite of its illegality.

Microsoft's monopoly has had a number of negative effects on the industry, with material, effective damage to consumers. The difficulties of proving this damage in the DOJ case were a direct consequence of choosing Netscape as the poster boy of monopoly victimhood.

----

The key is anti-competitive. Microsoft was found guilty of using its monopoly powers to displace competitors like Netscape by bundling its browser with the OS.

----

What you don't seem to notice is that that is not the key. It's completely NOT the point. It's off-topic.

It's like shooting someone in the head and blaming his death on his unhealthy diet and chronic alcoholism. Yes, it may have been killing him for years, but it's the bullet that really nailed him.

"Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?". IF XDOCS IS A COMPETITION TO PDF: YES, ALL THE ONES THAT MATTER.

Why? Because not even a monopoly can sell a non-product; for MS to push an alternative, even if it's free, it has to be good enough to be worth it.

---

If you were able to comprehend written English you would know that I was not referring to Z, but the qualifier "may have".. This brings into doubt Y, when in fact it's a fact that Y actually occured, so "may have" is incorrect.. if we're talking about proper use of English, of course.

---

All right, let's flame away: If you were able to comprehend English properly you would know that I knew exactly what you were referring to, and that I was criticizing precisely the parsing that led you to that interpretation.

The English language includes figures of speech that cannot be directly translated to prepositional calculus. The figure " X may be, but Z is still true" is one of those expressions.

But then again, perhaps you really do mean "proper" English as in a formalized canon that supersedes the informal conventions that people have been evolving for centuries. However, although I know of authorities for proper French, Spanish, Basque and others, I am not familiar with the Academy of the English Language, perhaps you could point me to their offices?

---
Have fun modding another post of yours up to 2!
---

Yes, because clicking on the "No Score +1 Bonus" box on each one of my comments would make me so morally superior.

Re:PDF goes a long way back with Bill Gates

[bumby]

It's time that there is a free PDF clone out there. Lets start work. dvi?

XDOC == XUL + WebServices for Office.Net

[palad1]

After reading about xdocs last week, we came to the following conclusion that XForm is in no way a end-user 'static' document format.

What it does is 'just' provide an link between a document and databases through .net WinForms embeded in an office doc, talking to a database via a webservice.

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 :

XXX

[lovebyte]

MS Xdocs
MS eXchange
MS Xbox
MS Windows XP

What next?
MS Xwindow?
MS Xnotfree86?

Re:XXX

[commodoresloat]

What next?

MS OS X.

Re:XXX

[NeuroManson]

Why would Microsoft need more Xs? Most people think of it as Xcrement anyway...

XDocs might threaten pdf in workflow environments

[Jjaks]

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.

Openoffice takes on PDF

[cpaluc]

Funny, I was just thinking today how *OpenOffice* might be a PDF competitor.

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*.

Shocking, just shocking

[blankmange]

And who out there is genuinely surprised by this move??? My only surprise is how long it took for MS to move on .pdf.

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.

Re:Shocking, just shocking

[kennylives]

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).

Of course they're memory-intensive. Or, at least, they can be. But, so what? I've never encountered an issue with that, even on relatively aneamic machines. That's what virtual memory is for.

And, just because you're too lazy to download the free viewer (no registration required!), doesn't make Adobe bad for not making it easier for you.

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.

Sorry, but I fail to see the lack of simplicity and ubiquity that you cite here. The only major desktop platform that doesn't include a way to view PDFs out of the box is Windows. MacOSX ships with both the Acrobat Reader and an applet called Preview that renders PDFs just fine too. Many of the Linux distro's ship with either XPdf, Acrobat Reader, or other tools to manage PDFs as well. For Windows, and every other platform out there, from PalmOS to Solaris, there's the free download of the client.

Adobe would be insane to sell Acrobat to MS or anyone else at this point. The've got a pretty solid document and image management suite (although it's not bundled that way). Loosing Acrobat would weaken that. If MS was at the helm, the only way to create PDFs would be to purchase the entire Office suite. And I guarantee that there would not be a Linux or PalmOS reader for the docs.

Besides, in case you hadn't noticed, PDF is already a defacto standard.

So bloody typical MS

[selderrr]

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...

Re:So bloody typical MS

[Mr_Silver]

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.

Why does it matter if they've innovated or not? So what if they're picking a market with only one competitor?

Competition is always a good thing, it doesn't help to have only one company sitting around getting complacent and failing to drive forward their product.

Of course, if the MS product really is inferior, then it won't sell.

(ignoring Windows and IE, because we all know how that became popular)

Re:So bloody typical MS

[SensitiveMale]

can anyone remember the last time they actually came up with something innovative ?

Yes, I can.

They invented the gui. no wait...

They invented the PDA. no wait...

They invented the little 'x' in the corner to close the window. no wait...

They invented the mouse. no wait...

They invented the task bar. no wait...

They invented a multi-user OS. no wait...

They invented their IP stack. no wait...

They invented multi-media on the computer. no wait...

They invented the internet browser. no wait...

They invented new ways to extend monopolies and even when busted they never get punished. They only have to promise not to break the law in the same way in the future.

YUP, that is what they invented.

Re:So bloody typical MS

[selderrr]

Of course, if the MS product really is inferior, then it won't sell.
I guess that's been proven wrong by now... linux is free and better yet they have only a marginal share of the desktop.

All the classical concepts like 'competition is good for the product and the consumer' are only valid up to a certain level. I'm not an economist but i think you can no longer consider those concepts valid once you're dealing with a player that has near-unlimited amounts of cash, is very aggressive and uses rather unethical methods of competing, has a monopoly in a closely related market and is willing to abuse that monopoly to crush non-followers of its rules...

On the other hand, I never said that MS had to be innovative. For all i care, they can write whatever they want, inferior or not. What I don't appreciate is the fact that they seek markets where they can use their economical weight to push out competitors.

Re:So bloody typical MS

[NeuroManson]

There's a common misperception in regards to what "innovation" means. Most companies that are not making a new and unique product depend largely on taking preexisting concepts and designs and either finding improvements or enhancements to said design, often creating their own proprietary applications.

For example, one could easily accuse Adobe of the exact same theft of concept:

(1)They patented Postscript type as a way to allow desktop publishing to advance to a point where it could compete with conventional printing shops, while similarly giving themselves a near monopoly on the desktop with applications such as Pagemaker. Speaking of which...

Pagemaker was a desktop publishing app that basically put Adobe on the map, despite it's being released at a time when there were multiple companies making various flavors of SOHO publishing solutions. Other than the GUI and certain key tools, it wasn't really that innovative, and Adobe can easily be accused of "ripping off" other software companies.

Also, the same applies to Photoshop. One could easily claim as well that it was almost a direct rip of MacPaint when it first came out. Once again, other than the GUI and key tools, it wasn't that innovative, there were hundreds of paint/edit programs on the market. Similarly, the same applies to Freehand (surprisingly, the sole piece of software that's not innovative at all, and still recieving ample competition from Corel).

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.

So Microsoft made their own "PDF Killer"... It isn't like they haven't ripped off other companies before, the implied fear of Adobe somehow losing to Microsoft in a market where they have a considerable share is ridiculous.

Personally, I dislike PDF, especially in terms of bloat and loading delays in browsers. It's ridiculous, to have to wait an extra 5-10 seconds for Acrobat to load (and another 10-15 seconds just to load the document into the browser, just to read a tech sheet. It's gotten increasingly slower as they add idiotic things like update scans that bog the system down with redundant inquiries, and the software steers further away from what it was originally meant to do: Read PDF documents.

Now as for real innovation, don't hold your breath hoping for it. The market currently depends on a very limited range of hardware, and as long as they're locked into established standards, they won't truly become innovative. Add to that the hobbling of VC funded "innovations", which never take off due to the incapacity of CEOs to look at the big picture (as evidenced from IBM's first taste of the microprocessor, without the slightest idea of what to do with it).

At least until they learn to, and this should be the mantra: Invent.

Re:So bloody typical MS

[Mr_Silver]

I guess that's been proven wrong by now... linux is free and better yet they have only a marginal share of the desktop

Better in what sense?

• Better user inteface?
• Better consistency?
• Easier to set up and configure?
• Better help files?

Small reality check for you, Linux on the desktop is not better for the average user.

Yes, it's more stable, and it's more secure and it's free but even the more hard-core Linux zealots would be hard pressed to claim that your average-joe-blow user think Linux on the desktop is better.

Re:So bloody typical MS

[sh4de]

Pagemaker was a desktop publishing app that basically put Adobe on the map, despite it's being released at a time when there were multiple companies making various flavors of SOHO publishing solutions. Other than the GUI and certain key tools, it wasn't really that innovative, and Adobe can easily be accused of "ripping off" other software companies.

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.

Also, the same applies to Photoshop. One could easily claim as well that it was almost a direct rip of MacPaint when it first came out. Once again, other than the GUI and key tools, it wasn't that innovative, there were hundreds of paint/edit programs on the market.

Photoshop succeeded because it was made by photographers (the Knoll brothers) for photographers. It could handle CMYK separations, crucial for any prepress work.

Re:So bloody typical MS

[Ben Hutchings]

I think you'll find PageMaker put Aldus on the map. Adobe didn't buy Aldus until 1994, when it already had Acrobat and Illustrator.

Re:So bloody typical MS

[mrm677]

I stopped reading this post as soon as you said "Pagemaker was a desktop publishing app that basically put Adobe on the map".

Sorry, but Adobe Pagemaker was formally known as Aldus Pagemaker.

Postscript is what put Adobe on the map. Then they developed Photoshop and the rest is history.

Re:So bloody typical MS

[Sloppy]

C'mon, Microsoft really did implement some things that nobody ever considered doing. For example:

• ActiveX: run unrestricted binary code with complete access, downloaded from a web page.
• Outlook: run scripts embedded inside email, again with complete access

Microsoft was there first. Name anyone else who ever intentionally did stuff like that before Microsoft.

Re:So bloody typical MS

[ces]

Please, get your facts straight:

Adobe did indeed invent PostScript (although it was based on work done at Xerox PARC), it was their first product.

Pagemaker and Freehand were both made by Aldus, Adobe bought Aldus in 1994. Freehand was sold to MacroMedia as Adobe already had Illustrator.

Adobe has a number of products they have developed themselves like Postscript, Type Manager, Acrobat, Illustrator, PhotoShop, InDesign, etc. They also have products they bought off others like Pagemaker and Framemaker.

For what it's worth Microsoft has a history of buying others products or licensing their code. PowerPoint, Access, FrontPage, FoxPro, Visio, etc. were all the result of MS buying other companies. SQL server was the result of MS licensing Sybase's code, IE was the result of MS licensing Spyglass Mosaic.

Better Yet

[Konster]

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. :)

Re:Better Yet

[Ektanoor]

Interesting... And you thing that M$ "All things bloated"(TM) will manage to do something thinner than PDF? And with the same quality? (No I'm not talking about canned features but _real_ quality, ex. security, reliability)

Why not use DjVu?

[SWroclawski]

The DjVu people claim to have a pretty document system that does all the nice display stuff like PS and PDF, and also includes a layer for plain text (for those of us who want to extract it).

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

Re:Why not use DjVu?

[adolf]

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.

Re:Sorry boys

[Captain Large Face]

>blockquote>I have to go and install some v.slow and large application to load them.

How is this any different from Word Documents?

Re:Sorry boys

[jilles]

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.

Re:Sorry boys

[Mr_Silver]

but I find .pdf files a *major* ballache. I often find the computer I'm on doesn't support loading them so I have to go and install some v.slow and large application to load them.

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.

PDF Killer?

[Dunark]

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.

Re:Sorry boys

[ProfessorPuke]

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.

Immediate Stock Hit?

[devnullkac]

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.

Re:Immediate Stock Hit?

[Winterblink]

I think it's because they're still riding the wave of the court ruling in their favor.

I'm not buying into this...

[iamwhatiseem]

.. having been in the design field for 19 years. When PDF's came along it was the best thing since sliced bread. ALL design software worth anything supports PDF's now. They will not support the new MS one, at least not for quite awhile. And with Adobe InDesign climbing the ranks, I don't see any immediate threat.
Also there have been very FEW viruses that infect PDF's, imagine the viruses that will be written for M$'s version.

Re:I'm not buying into this...

[mjpaci]

Thank service bureaus for this, too. Forgive my spelling.

Re:I'm not buying into this...

[verch]

First off I think Adobe makes great products and I think it will be very hard for MS to attack their niche. That being said, I wouldn't be so sure that it will take a long time for other vendors to support MS's new 'standard'. MS can make it very hard for ISVs to exist if they want to. For instance, it would be a big problem for most software houses if they didn't get to test or even see Longhorn or whatever new version of windows and start porting their product to it until it hit the retail shelves. Good or bad, MS is still the 800lb gorilla of the industry, and pissing it off can be bad for your existence if you depend on selling products that run under their OS.

Workflow

[panurge]

A lot of small publishing operations are only now in the process of moving to a PDF-based workflow. I can just see the big print people and the rip engine designers being absolutely delighted at the prospect of another "standard" (we need a word to describe these non-cooperative standards, one that will get through Net Nanny) to spread FUD.

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.

Re:NEFARIOUS PDF MONOPOLY?

[commodoresloat]

easy tiger. I didn't say I agreed with the argument; just that MS could plausibly make it. They've made less plausible arguments in the past for sure.

Hooray for Microsoft

[SecGreen]

At least with Microsoft involved, we'll never have to worry about truly unbreakable copy protection in PDFs!

Why is all of a sudden PDF so much better?

[forgoil]

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;))

Re:Sorry boys

[sakaruk]

But surely the ideal solution would be for M$ Word to support PDF docs. That would please all users.

At the analysts party...

[Qbertino]

And now, Ladys and Gentlemen,
"...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 /., or whatever?

Re:Sorry boys

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sorry boys

[Stary]

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.

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.

Re:Wow, that's stupid

[khuber]

Neither PDF or Java are open standards, they are published proprietary standards.

-Kevin

Not really new "News"

[ICantType]

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.

In the case of Excel...

[rcs1000]

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.

Re:In the case of Excel...

[Ben Hutchings]

Why would Lotus listen to Microsoft when MS shafted them with MS-DOS 2 in a vain attempt to promote their own less capable spreadsheet? Also, wouldn't the effort of porting 1-2-3 to Windows version 1 or 2 have been mostly wasted, given that hardly anyone used them for anything more than playing Othello?

Re:In the case of Excel...

[Fafhrd]

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

Not true... IBM and Microsoft both told everybody to develop for OS/2, as that was what the future held. That was when Lotus released 1-2-3/G, the OS/2 version.

When Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and it was a success, almost nobody had Windows versions for its products ready. Except Microsoft, who had improved versions of its office tools (including a new Word for Windows, where Word was only for DOS before) ready for Windows a few months later.

Again, developers were focusing on OS/2 because Microsoft told them to. The IBM/Microsoft schism only came later.

Re:Sorry boys

[Twylite]

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.

PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs

[starvingartist12]

...reports on a new Microsoft PDF-killer technology to be included in Office 11, called XDoc

The PDF-killer isn't XDocs. It isn't even new technology.

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.

Re:PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs

[Baki]

Why the hell would Acrobat be more proprietary than some as of yet unknwon XML DTD (or schema)?

The only fundamental difference is:
binary format (Acrobat) versus ASCII/Unicode (XML) i.e. 'human readable'.

First, proprietary not human readable. Proprietary means an undisclosed file format.

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. At best, it might be easier to reverse engineer (which is forbidden in the US).

AFAIK, Acrobat is an open format (yes, even binary formats can be open, gasp). Whether XDoc(s) shall be open remains to be seen.

This irritating misuse of proprietary and concept of 'not binary == good' misleads to many mistakes and creates false understanding.

Re:PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs

[Fafhrd]

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.

Re:PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs

[leshert]

PDF is proprietary in the same way that Java is. They are controlled by a single company, which can change the meaning of the format at its whim--including adding "features" that happen to be backwards compatible with older versions of the controller's software but not that of competitors (AOL Instant Messenger is a perfect example).

XML is not proprietary; the basic syntax, most extensions, and many DTDs and schemas are controlled by a standards body.

Re:PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs

[WWWWolf]

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.

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.

Re:PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs

[wfrp01]

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?

Re:PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs

[Baki]

Do you really believe that MSFT shall hand the DTD for XDoc(s) over to some external body?!? If they would at least publish that DTD (with good documentation on how to interpret the various tags/attributes) it would be on par with PDF. But I doubt very much they shall do that. If not, XDoc, whether XML based or not, is proprietary, and PDF is not.

Re:PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs

[leshert]

Do you really believe that MSFT shall hand the DTD for XDoc(s) over to some external body?

Don't know, yet. They have submitted some things (MSN messenger protocol, C#), and have withheld others (CIFS). But that's not what my point was.

If not, XDoc, whether XML based or not, is proprietary, and PDF is not.

*sigh* My point was that, regardless of whether XDoc is open, proprietary, or imaginary, PDF is proprietary. Proprietary doesn't mean secret, or binary, or evil, or good, or whatever else your definition of the week is. It means that it is the property, and remains under the control of, a single private source.

Re:PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs

[Black Perl]

You completely misunderstand XDoc. There is no DTD for XDoc. XDoc is not an XML format. It is an application that can edit XML, using arbitrary user-defined schema.

Re:Wow, that's stupid

[InrdZQdxdqn]

PDF is a documented, established format

That's right for the moment but what if...

Step 1. Microsoft implements in Windows some kind of PDF reader. ("MS PDF Explorer?", Acrobat Reader gone!)

Step 2. Then, after giving "for free" their PDF editor, start adding new features to their PDF docs ("MS PDF Frontpage" or "save as pdf" option in word, Adobe Acrobat gone!)

Step 4. You have now "Adobe PDF" and "Microsoft PDF", guess who wins...

Step 5. Cry.

Though "Adobe PDF" may be some trademark, I don't think they can own ".pdf" file extension.

Re:Sorry boys

[ProfessorPuke]

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!

a replacement for Microsoft Word forms

[g4dget]

XDocs seems to be mostly about forms. Many businesses already use forms in Microsoft Word format; XDocs, being XML based, has to be better than that dreadful format.

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.

Less like IE, more like WMA

[XJoshX]

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.

PDF = open format, won't go away

[forged]

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.

Re:PDF = open format, won't go away

[forged]

And here is the URL:

Portable Document Format Reference Manual Version 1.3
(near the bottom of the page)

Ahh I feel ignorant

[billcopc]

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.

Why adobe purchased accelio

[Bazzargh]

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.

Re:Sorry boys

[The-Bus]

On your Linux box, you can download StarOffice from Sun (which I believe is still free as in beer, or at least it used to be).

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 .NFO files that are plain text with lots of ASCII art. I'd like nothing more than to get a press release from Adobe saying something like this:

Due to new competition from Microsoft, we will now be embracing the new NFO standard. This allows you to share documents truly between any system, with documents 10% the size of PDF files. Also, you can have graphics such as a cool-ass dragon breathing fire around your letterhead right over a banner that says: "M Y C O M P U T O R C O M P A N Y R O X O R S!"

Of course Microsoft would write back and say that now Edit.com will be integrated into Office, Windows Media Player, and Microsoft Soccer.

PDF

[nuggz]

PDF is published.
There are free interpreters.

I thought Apple was using Display Postscript, not PDF. Didn't gnustep make a Display Ghostscript?

Xdocs will feature...

[jmv]

Many enhancements over PDF, including:
- Windows-only support
- Enforces "Digital Restrictions Management"
- Break the format at every new Office version
- EULA that gives MS copyright for all your documents ...but unfortunately with MS marketing it might even catch on :(

Re:Xdocs will feature...

[jelle]

- Comes bundled free with the purchase of an overpriced other product. Only free if you have a valid license for that other product.
- Will begin charging for it as soon as you're hooked. The first shot is always free.
- Every time you use it, it gives you a popup that it cannot display the content until it first downloads an installs a software upgrade.
- then tries to sell you stuff before it shows you the document.
- Only gives good results when generating docs originally created using other ms products. In all other cases, it screws up the formatting. So does changing the video or printer driver, or mouse by the way.

Re:XDocs might threaten pdf in workflow environmen

[chewy]

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.

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 .doc files and can't read my CV, I ignore them by principle.

Re:Sorry boys

[ProfessorPuke]

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.

XDocs is not a pdf competitor!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

XDocs has almost nothing to do with pdf. Please read the article or the description of xdocs on MS site.

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 .Net server products, Microsoft can address both sides of the forms equation.

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 .Net server components, as it most likely will be, Microsoft will have a significant selling point.

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."
---

Re:Wow, that's stupid

[offpath3]

Step 3 is obviously Profit!

yeah, but this is *microsoft*

[caveat]

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.

Take the Microsoft Pledge!

[Telecommando]

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.)

Re:Take the Microsoft Pledge!

[mz001b]

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.

I would like to amend this by adding "under Bill" to the "One Operating System" line.

Re:Take the Microsoft Pledge!

[EzInKy]

Absolutely hilarious!Is it GFDL'd?

Re:Take the Microsoft Pledge!

[Telecommando]

Absolutely hilarious!Is it GFDL'd?

I don't suppose it matters. Anyone who wants will just copy it anyway.
It just came to me this morning while I was in the shower.

Judge CKK verdict leaked before market close

[DrSkwid]

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

It's not a PDF killer

[AndroidCat]

The new format in Office 11 is an Office 10 killer. Microsoft makes far more money pushing the new upgrade than it could squashing Adobe. (And for bonus points, doesn't this version of Office require the latest OS upgrade too?)

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?

End user readability

[Servo]

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.

Re:End user readability

[MtViewGuy]

I think people are misunderstanding what XDocs really does.

XDocs is pretty much XML-formatted documents and forms, more or less. Any program that can read and manipulate XML should be able to read and modify XDocs documents with generally no problems.

I find it kind of hilarious that while everyone is complaining that XDocs will become a competitor to Adobe Acrobat's .PDF format, XDocs is based on the rapidly-growing standard of XML that will be part of all the major future operating systems (Windows, Linux, BSD variants, commercial UNIX variants and MacOS X).

In short, when you create an XDocs document people with Linux and FreeBSD on their desktops who have XML support installed should be able to read and modify XDocs documents easily.

You clearly haven't done print.

[abulafia]

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

Re:You clearly haven't done print.

[evilviper]

PDFs are entirely editable in many applications.

Well, I've used Adobe, and it certainly doesn't come close... What is this magical program?

HTML is markup. PDF is page description. There is an enormous difference.
Anything you could want to print can be accurately reproduced with HTML. There certainly is a difference, but HTML is certainly not more limited than PDF.

Re:You clearly haven't done print.

[abulafia]

Well, I've used Adobe, and it certainly doesn't come close... What is this magical program?

Adobe what? Adobe Illustrator, for one, is a fine platform for editing them. Photoshop will happily import them (not quite the same thing, but then Photoshop is a raster based platform). Other vendors provide PDF editing, too, but I'm less familiar with them, so I won't mention them.

Anything you could want to print can be accurately reproduced with HTML. There certainly is a difference, but HTML is certainly not more limited than PDF.

I'm not trying to be rude here, but you really don't know what you're talking about. Show me trapping, font kerning, font deformation, CMYK, PPD device hints, or multi-layer transparency screen angle adjustments in HTML. And that's without getting into some of the cooler features of Postscript, or the features of PDF that make it attractive to print shops.

I highly suggest you actually look at what professional printers do for a living before making assertions like this. At the very least, take an HTML document to a prepress and ask them what it will cost to get it to output correctly on a large print run. You'll probably give them hives, or be laughed at, or both.

Re:You clearly haven't done print.

[evilviper]

Adobe what?

A mental slip-up on my part. I meant Acrobat... however, I did mention that I've used Acrobat in my original post, so that shouldn't have been too much of a stretch.

Show me [...]

You know, I have a harder time finding the definitons for these terms than I do thinking of the HTML solution.

I openly admit I'm not a professional printer. I draw my conclusion on the fact that I've never seen a document, anywhere, that could not have been perfectly reproduced in HTML. That doesn't mean that HTML has all the commands to control printing methods that PDF currently does. That said, it certainly doesn't mean they could not be added if wanted. People are putting all sorts of new code inside HTML every day...

font kerning

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that kerning is already done (at least by Mozilla & the Helvetica font). What you might want is to disable kerning, which would certainly not be a problem.

And that's without getting into some of the cooler features of Postscript, or the features of PDF that make it attractive to print shops.

So if these are the lowsy features, why are you stressing them?

take an HTML document to a prepress and ask them what it will cost to get it to output correctly on a large print run.

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.

Of course, the fact remains that anyone can convert HTML to PS/PDF practically in their sleep.

XDocs is just a modern clone of Lotus Notes

[thing12]

It's a just an editor and toolkit to put forms on your company intranet (and probably later the Internet) to gather data. That's all it is - not a PDF killer - not even a PDF competitor. From Microsoft's XDocs web site:

"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.

Re:XDocs is just a modern clone of Lotus Notes

[scottme]

I have to say I strongly agree with this - that XDocs is far more of a threat to Lotus Notes (and Domino) than it is to PDF. I know it's fashionable on /. to rubbish Notes as a piss-poor email client, but IBM/Lotus have millions of customers out there using it. Many observers consider that Notes is the jewel in Lotus' crown that convinced IBM to buy the company. MS have long aspired to duplicate the function of Notes but so far all their efforts (mostly in the shape of Exchange) have foundered because while Exchange/Outlook may do email marginally better than Domino/Notes, the MS products struggle to deliver rapid development of collaborative applications that integrate into that email backbone.

Just read what MS say about it. XDocs is a client-side forms-based application that communicates with a back-end server that stores and shares documents. Sounds a hell of a lot like Notes/Domino to me. And with a well-architected use of XML and the Office franchise to back it, it should be well able to give Lotus a good run for their money, the 15+ year headstart that Lotus have on such solutions nothwithstanding.

By the way, there was an article about this in The Register three weeks ago when MS announced it.

Re:XDocs is just a modern clone of Lotus Notes

[glenstar]

And that in itself is not new... MS has had "Exchange Forms" for a very long time. Of course, the *only* time I ever had to use them was while contracting at MS, but still... ;-)

I would bet that XForms is simply an extension of Exchange Forms and indeed is being built by MS to be a Notes slayer.

Actually...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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?

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.

Or is it because Microsoft crushed the opposition by exploiting their monopoly? I think you'll find that Microsoft ensured that the "best product" never got made, because they knew it wouldn't be theirs.

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.

Re:Actually...

[blamanj]

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?

Actually, they took a page from IBM's monopoly playbook (long time ago) and used a technique called bundling. They had all those nasty competitors in word processing, so they created the "office suite." You buy their word processor and get a spreadsheet for free.

Now all the competitors had to scramble, because simply lowering prices wasn't sufficient, they had to have a product offering in the "suite" category, which mean buying or developing something, which either took time or meant that you didn't have a product that was nearly as integrated as MS Office.

While Excel is good, they did not win in the marketplace merely on its merits.

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

While MS' success certainly took off when they started packaging things as "Microsoft Office", I think we should also give credit where it's due. Until that point, if I wanted to produce a document with more than just words in it, I needed to spend hundreds of pounds on specialist DTP software that really did almost nothing except import data from other formats and stuff it together on a page. With the advent of the combined office suite, and technologies such as DDE in Windows, it became pretty straightforward to produce a Word document (or, later, a Powerpoint presentation) incorporating tables or charts from the spreadsheet. I could finally have some decent formatting for my database reports, too, if I exported them via Word.

Couple this with the relatively uniform support for screen display and printing provided realistically for the first time on a PC by Windows, and the advent of fonts worth using for those of us without the money to buy Adobe Type Manager with Windows 3.1, and these things genuinely did allow Joe User to produce a much nicer document than he ever could using the old DOS kit. (Not that many people did, but the power was there for those who learned to use it.)

I can't understand why any of this is remotely abusive of any sort of power MS may then have had. It simply was better than the opposition, and for its time, much of this stuff was revolutionary. We take it for granted today, and cite a half dozen big examples where MS bought someone out and sold the product as their own, but people around here are pretty quick to forget the genuine innovations they have produced in the past, IMHO.

Re:Actually...

[blamanj]

It simply was better than the opposition, and for its time, much of this stuff was revolutionary.

True, the overall picture presented by the suite was better than the competition on the PC, but it was hardly revolutionary. Apple, as usual, had already built Publish/Subscribe in the late 80's and was working on OpenDoc, and the whole idea of embedded documents was explored in the early 80's at MIT and Xerox.

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sorry, didn't mean to suggest that MS had come up with all of this stuff from scratch, just that they were the first people to provide this functionality in a useful form on the PC. Thus they really did have a genuine and compelling technical advantage over the opposition at the time.

This could easily have been predicted

[smartin]

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.

Google cache of article

[ThatTallGuy]

... is here, since the site is refusing connections.

Some points

[dachshund]

For example, one could easily accuse Adobe of the exact same theft of concept

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not needed

[Ed Avis]

What's the point? Everyone knows that Word documents are the only interchangeable document format you'll ever need.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable... until....

[locutux]

"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!

MS is to Netscape as Apple is to Adobe

[elliotj]

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.

Re:Sorry boys

[Stary]

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.

Sorry is the word, alright

[ackthpt]

but I find .pdf files a *major* ballache. I often find the computer I'm on doesn't support loading them so I have to go and install some v.slow and large application to load them.

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.

Nothing to do with PDF!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Now or never...

[SerpentMage]

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!

Re:Now or never...

[SerpentMage]

Oh you are so right... I remember it used to be buy IBM and you will have no problem. Now it is MS. And people have become more lazy regarding looking at all of the options.

On the one day people will wander days throughout the various car dealer's, shopping malls, grocery stores. But once it comes to computer software, the brain stops working!

That is not the only issue at stake here

[pvera]

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?

Re:That is not the only issue at stake here

[kilfarsnar]

Your PC not having Acrobat reader went on for years?! It's a free download! I have not found PDF to be inconvenient on the PC. Yes, you need the reader app, but otherwise it works pretty well. All you're doing is opening a file after all. OS 9 needed add on software too. Really, it's not PDF that's a pain, it's the PC. ;-P

It's only competing against .doc

[SpinyNorman]

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.

Re:XDocs might not be easily modifiable.

[yog]

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.

Kinda lame

[h0mi]

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.

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 .doc readers for free in an attempt to turn ubiquitous .docs into .pdf killers. Anyone remember those doc (and .xls too) readers?

jack of all trades

[Alarion]

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...

People should use postscript anyway

[wfrp01]

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.

Re:But it's XML...

[SerpentMage]

XDocs and MS Office 11 XML may or may not be the same thing. Sure today they are the same thing, but what about tomorrow?

What about documents that are encrypted? Can they be reverse engineered to be displayed in another browser?

What people fail to realize is that MS will use security, secure computing, trustworthy computing, etc to stave off third parties...

Here is a conspiracy theory... Office 11 does not support Windows ME, etc. Why is that? MS says we need to innovate and do secure computing! Well it sure as H**L did not stop them having backwards support. Or could it be that Wine and co have gotten so good that they can support a large number of Windows ME, etc apps. At that point a new trick has to be played and this is done in the name of security, but the reality is that it is done to stave off the Linux masses... This is predatory behaviour!

implementation?

[Bodrius]

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...

Re:implementation?

[caveat]

the OS does already check each file..at least i think typing is done by the OS. i imagine at some point when you open a file, be it from the OS or an app (i'm not a programmer, so i woudn't know for certain) the OS handles it - what's to keep m$ from just having the OS summarily delete any pdf it finds?
yes, i realize this is all about as subtle as a hammer to the forebrain, but like i said before, this is /microsoft/ - subtlety isn't one of their strong suits.

Re:implementation?

[Bodrius]

The OS doesn't "check" each file. That would be prohibitive. At most it could check the bytestream as it is read from the disk, and (I'm not familiar with PDF details) it might not be clearly identifiable at the beginning. In some cases it might be worth it (executables could be checked for safety, for example), but even then it has its costs in speed, and for data it's irrational... are you willing to read that 600MB swapfile into memory before deciding which type it is?!

A file is a collection of data stored in the disk. About the only "typing" the OS normally has is whether that piece of data is "executable" or not.

What you suggest is a filesystem with metadata, which is not necessarily a bad idea, but it's not very popular these days and even where it's present it can only be much more general than that, providing a slot for information that applications can use. In Windows, and for compatibility reasons now many other OSes, there is only "pseudo-typing" by extensions in the filename, but this is merely a convention to facilitate "application integration" (mapping extensions to applications) since typing is only useful for applications.

The problem with putting this at such a low level as the OS is that the OS cannot, nor should it, know all the types of data/programs there can be. It's not its job. If it were, it would seriously limit the use of the machine.

Windows cannot "summarily delete all pdf files" because it cannot distinguish them that easily from other collections of bytes. Even if they are tagged with the PDF extension, it's not certain that it means it's a PDF, and if it assumes so, that doesn't delete the files that don't follow the convention (because they came from different filesystems, or because they were named, say, pdfv2 or something like that by Adobe).

This is just a matter of subtlety. Like lobotomizing your hyperactive kid, not only will it get you in trouble, but it will be a big obstacle for your own plans for the future.

ADA 508 Compliance for Federal Websites...

[dolguy]

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.

So with XML does this mean...

[A_Non_Moose]

that Word will finally get back "Reveal Codes" in some form or another?
.

Pathetic state of things...

[GlobalMind]

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.

Re:Pathetic state of things...

[WildBeast]

Grow up, why would anyone use it if it ain't good? After all the PDF format is free.

Re:Pathetic state of things...

[WildBeast]

And so you just assume that MS is wrong by doing this? How is it wrong to grow profits?

Re:Pathetic state of things...

[WildBeast]

Funny because I see more Apple ads on TV than MS ads. Actually I rarely see MS ads on TV.

They have a lot of power, so what? The government have a lot of power to and I don't see anyone complaining. Sony have a lot of power to.

I'm sure MS stock goes down when they announce that Linux was deployed in such or such huge organisation instead of Windows.

Re:Sorry boys

[uradu]

> 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.

Re:Sorry boys

[schon]

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.

Re:PDF goes a long way back with Bill Gates

[netsharc]

Do you work for them? That program looks like a rip-off of Ghostview and Ghostscript, (well they acknowledge that they based the program on those 2 files), I wonder why it's not GPLed, they certainly are just repackaging the programs.

Someone call the GNU Lawyer.

Closed Specification

[N8F8]

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.

Re:Nah - Is there PDF licensing?

[TrebleJunkie]

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.

It will work too

[ThousandStars]

Speaking as someone who uses Acrobat to create .pdf files on a regular basis, I bet that Microsoft will win this battle with ease. As much as I dislike it, everyone I know uses Office. As a result, if a .pdf-like can be created automatically with Office, there will be a greatly reduced need for Acrobat.

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.

XDocs isn't PostScript

[adrew]

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.

Re:Wow, that's stupid

[anno1a]

Nobody cares! I care. You care. Some amount of slashdot readers care, but that's about it. The normal consumer (if there ever was one) couldn't care less. He wants what's easiest, and when he's got a pre-installed ms-pdf-clone, that's what he'll use.

SVG

[srussell]

What might "kill" PDF is the sneaker-technology, SVG. As anyone who's done a lot of SVG knows, SVG is missing support for only one feature that would enable it to replace HTML and PDF -- support for text flow control. The 2.0 version of the SVG spec (4.2/2/2) will include rules for this support.

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:

1. Autotrace will generate PS (PDF's older brother) and SVG (among other things)
2. FOP will generate document output as PS, PDF, and SVG (among other things).
3. Most vector graphics programs for Linux have some SVG support, and Sodipodi uses SVG as its native document format. Open/StarOffice will generate SVG as well.

Wow!

[Pig Hogger]

Wow! Another virus vector!!! Who said innovative technology is dull???

XDocs has nothing to do with PDF - I've seen it

[tbray]

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.

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, /. is suposed to be technically competent.

Re:XDocs has nothing to do with PDF - I've seen it

[leighklotz]

It would be nice if Microsoft supported W3C standards like XForms...

US Legal System, MS a little late

[bobaferret]

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-

Take on^Hout

[SgtChaireBourne]

Leveraging a monopoly to prevent competition is anything but free market. It's also anything but good for the economy. The IT boom was driven by interoperability ( read TCP/IP and HTTP ). Everything Microsoft has been doing in recent years has been to reduce that interoperability. In other words, they've been hindering economic growth, especially in the U.S. where their lobbying/marketing has been heaviest.

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.

Re:Take on^Hout

[spongman]

so someone's gotta explain to me where exaclty this monopoly is. can anyone tell me which market Microsoft is in where it has NO viable competitors?

Multiplatform

[jelle]

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...

Re:XDocs might threaten pdf in workflow environmen

[MtViewGuy]

I think people are making a major mistake of thinking that XDocs is essentially a Microsoft-only format.

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 .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.

XDocs' Potential

[LowellPorter]

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.

Lighten up a little...

[Gruneun]

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.

Re:IE and Office are already squabbling

[ianscot]

As Office evolves it will be more and more integrated into IE

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.

Re:Sorry boys

[cmdr_beeftaco]

I'm a document engineer.

aka a secretary . oh wait you know VB, you must be an engineer.

Sad but True

[siskbc]

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!

Re:Sad but True

[PurpleFloyd]

So I wouldn't feel too good about my Adobe stock, maybe. Of course, I don't see them going after Photoshop.

Oh, but they did! As a previous poster mentioned, they had a little product called PhotoDraw, the "Office business graphics program". It was launched with some fanfare about 2 years ago. Since then, it has quietly died off. And what was it designed to compete against? Why, Adobe Photoshop of course! While MS has been able to force many products off the market (like they probably intended to do with Photoshop), this one just didn't make the cut.

Re:Sad but True

[Anonvmous Coward]

"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. "

You forgot:

-????
-Profit!

I'm not just making a stale joke here, you've missed the step where MS actually makes large sums of money.

Re:Sad but True

[Metrol]

I can't think of any flat-out LOSSES for MS

Quicken

Re:Sad but True

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I'm not just making a stale joke here, you've missed the step where MS actually makes large sums of money.

Isn't that implied by them maintaining a monopoly, so they're the only game in town?

Re:Sad but True

[Anonvmous Coward]

Nope. It's not.

Re:And just out of curiosity

[RevDobbs]

Does anyone else think there could be an argument made that calling MS Office "productive software" might be stretching things a bit?

What do you mean? Why, just the other day it took me only three hours to pick just the right font (I went with Comic Sans) for the PowerPoint presentation I may be giving (time permitting) to my peers in middle management during our half day "Effective Use of Bullet Points, Bold, and Underlining" seminar.

I can't wait for next week's "Attaching Word Docs with Large Embedded Images to an Email" class!!!

Adobe has a stronghold

[rigmort]

As a person who is heavily involved in the print/prepress world, I can solidly say that the industry (one of the largest on earth) won't be dropping PDF any time soon.

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."

DeVry University Introduces

[cmdr_beeftaco]

DeVry University Introduces Document Engineering.

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.

Stock is UP, article is FUD

[Gothmolly]

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?

You're an idiot, and so are the moderators.

[Wakko Warner]

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.

Re:You're an idiot, and so are the moderators.

[Jobe_br]

Just a note - I don't totally disagree with the issue you're splitting hairs over, BUT - most standards, open or otherwise, are controlled by vendors. Who do you think sits in on all the working groups for the IETF, W3C, and IEEE - not to mention ISO, et al.

Just an FYI.

Just one thing

[bogie]

"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.

Re:Just one thing

[Locutus]

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.

Somebody doesn't know history... Microsoft could hijack the Adobe print functions on all PC shipped and all systems installing MS Office, OS patches, etc. It would take well over a year, if not two, to get court time on this and by then Adobe would lose tons of marketshare. They would be financially weakened to the point that even though it looks like they would win the case, they'd have to settle out of court just to get SOMETHING from this before closing shop.
This is how Microsoft works. There is very little ,if any, innovation that actually wins them marketshare. It's all done with "cousin Lou"/brute-force marketing and bundling tactics.

There is absolutely nothing in Microsofts history that says THIS xdoc thing will be handled any differently. Only when they step out of the PC mainstream( WebTV, xbox, stinker, etc ) do they find this "business" model doesn't work.

And if you think that requireing MS Office 11 will be a problem, Microsoft would just start publishing everything in xdoc format. If you use MS Windows, you will be REQUIRED to have a certain version of the OS and most likely certain version of things like MS Internet explorer, MS Office, etc. This is not new stuff here, it's how MS works.

LoB

Re:Just one thing

[dimator]

Oh, come on. Get realistic. We've all seen how Microsoft shoe-horns their products onto the desktops of millions. With IE during the browser war, and most recently with the hard to remove, hard to hide MSN messenger tray applet in XP.

Have no doubt in your mind that the "Print to XDoc" feature will be more prominantly displayed, more intrusive, and difficult if not impossible to get rid of.

X [You can type more than that for your subject]

[Citizen of Earth]

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.

Its only the beginning

[nurb432]

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'..

Scripting Please!

[tomdarch]

Just so Microsoft can reference something (no matter how desperate) that claims that users want various scripting/macro powers for these 'XDoc' thingies:

"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!

Re:Vaporware tactics have worked often.

[joto]

Except DR-DOS didn't work with WfW 3.11 (If I remember correctly. Of course, this was because Microsoft deliberately crippled WfW, not because of technical reasons).

Re:And just out of curiosity

[joto]

Does anyone else think there could be an argument made that calling MS Office "productive software" might be stretching things a bit?

Yes, but that is true for almost any kind of software. An operating system doesn't operate (a surgeon does). A word processor doesn't process words (the brain does), a spreadsheet isn't a sheet at all (and it doesn't it spread much), a data base doesn't have any data, a compiler doesn't compile and an assembler doesn't assemble (they both translate), a text editor doesn't edit (although you may use it for editing), a web browser doesn't browse (although you can use it to browse, although some people also read from it), most utilities aren't utilities (in the economic sense), and so on...

Microsoft PDF

[Peer]

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.

Re:Wow, that's stupid

[Jeremy Erwin]

Not as clunky, and I prefer GTK over Adobe's fugly widget set.


Just for the record, Adobe's "fugly" widget set would be OSI/Motif.

Cause for worry!

[CaptainPhong]

We've gotta keep an eye on this one - remember out .bmp killed .gif and .jpg?

This is one of many...

[GooberToo]

...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.

subvert xml?

[MemeRot]

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....

Microsoft replacing PDFs? PHHHT!

[Twintop]

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.)

Don't need to subvert XML

[SuperKendall]

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.

PDF killer my ass.

[FFFish]

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.

Re:Vaporware tactics have worked often.

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Except DR-DOS didn't work with WfW 3.11 (If I remember correctly. Of course, this was because Microsoft deliberately crippled WfW, not because of technical reasons)."

The story I heard was that the beta version of WfW threw up a message that said "you are running Dr Dos". It was just a message, it didn't crash. It was confusing to people, though.

If that's true then MS had every reason to do that. They had no idea how compatible DrDos was with Windows, and they weren't going to fix it for somebody else's product. They can go fix their own.

I caught that on CNN one day many years ago, but never followed up with it so who knows what's really true. It is a more believable story, though.

MSWord?

[Grendel Drago]

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

Re:MSWord?

[TrebleJunkie]

"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.

Re:Reasons I hate PDF

[creep]

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.

You all seem to be forgetting something.

[solios]

And that's Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark Xpress, Pagemaker, Freehand, etceteras. The world does not revolve around office.

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 .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.

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. :P)

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.

Re:Sorry boys

[ProfessorPuke]

(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!

Re:Vaporware tactics have worked often.

[joto]

The story I heard was that the beta version of WfW threw up a message that said "you are running Dr Dos". It was just a message, it didn't crash. It was confusing to people, though.

Well, I would never imagine it would have crashed. That would have been dead embarassing. But simply not starting is not much better (considering that the user probably wanted to run WfW even though it came from MS).

If that's true then MS had every reason to do that. They had no idea how compatible DrDos was with Windows, and they weren't going to fix it for somebody else's product.

Well, you may say that is a good reason. But if you really think that, then you probably have to mean that every other non-microsoft software should make a similar message appear when running a microsoft product. E.g. "I see your system is running winzip. Note that this is untrusted software that is not written by Microsoft. Your system may not work as a result of this." Depending on whether your or mine memory was right, you may append to the message: "For security reasons, Windows 2000 will shutdown now".

Re:Reasons I hate PDF

[jonadab]

> Am I the only person who absolutely hates PDF's

No. I loathe them. However...

> 1) have to buy [...] to be able to produce these documents
No, you don't. You can "print" from any application to a postscript
file using a standard driver and then convert to a PDF. Easy. The
only question is, why would you _want_ to do that? The original
document was more useful in most cases than the resulting PDF.

> 2) where the documents get positively huge
They are larger than they need to be, but this is not the issue IMO.

> 3) where the documents' compression is so varied... you compress,
I really don't care about the compression.

My problems with PDF are more in terms of its supposed portability
(which is fundamentally a _weakness_ of the format, not a strength;
the only thing _less_ portable would be a proprietary word processing
format) and the lack of any decent viewing software. (By decent, I
mean the ability to use my colour preferences (because blinding white
backgrounds are more evil than Bill Gates), the ability to search, to
copy text to the clipboard, to scroll off the bottom of one page and
onto the top of the next, and to do all the other usual things you
can normally do with regular documents that are a royal pain with
PDF if they are even possible.) I've tried xpdf, Acrobat Reader,
ghostview, GSView, and a couple of others, and _none_ of them can
manage the basic level of functionality of Netscape 3 or Word Perfect
6 for Windows 3, to say nothing of the functionality of a modern
browser or word processing application. When I have to use a PDF,
I feel like I'm stuck in 1985, technologically. Basically, putting
your content in a PDF is saying to me, "I want you to really have to
be desparate for this information, so I'm going to make you jump
through a lot of HOOPS to get it! If you're not truly desparate to
see this information, go away."

Re: nothing wrong with principles

[pHDNgell]

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?

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. ...whatever makes you feel better, I guess, but you should at least learn to spell ``principle'' before telling people they should disregard them.

Re:Vaporware tactics have worked often.

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Well, you may say that is a good reason. But if you really think that, then you probably have to mean that every other non-microsoft software should make a similar message appear when running a microsoft product"

Nope, that's flawed logic. Windows doesn't run on Winzip, Winzip runs on Windows. However, when Windows 2000 has a driver that isn't certified, you do get a warning that says "sure you wanna do this?". The reason they do that is, quite simply, the machine could stop running.

So yes, they're already doing that. And nobody's boo-hooing over it.

Free PDF distiller

[tonyhill]

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

Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable... until....

[eyeball]

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..

There's a sucker born every minute

[alizard]

While Adobe is NOT our friend, Adobe stock pricing dropping in response to the announcement by Microsoft a vaporware format that will apparently work only with Office 11 and which has zero installed base either among users or creators suggests that investors haven't learned a damned thing from the rise and fall of the Internet bubble.

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.

Re:Market expansion NOT Adobe destruction!

[spitzak]

I'm sure Grandma will figure out regedit, right after she recompiles the kernel on her Linux box.

Re:Nah - Is there PDF licensing?

[notestein]

Below are some instructions I put together some time back for configuring an open source PDF writer for use in Windows XP. This acts like PDF Writer from Adobe. It shows up as a printer driver.

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 /X" from a command line.

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!

correction

[alizard]

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.

Let the real judge decide...

[smittyoneeach]

...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 .pdf format is such that, even if Oxx introduces competing functionality, it will likely be met with a big, 'so, what?' by the market.

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!

Re:Nah - Is there PDF licensing?

[flossie]

+1 informative.

(but I think "apt-get install gs-aladdin" is slightly easier =)

XDocs and PDF are not doing the same thing

[rochlin]

Is XDocs a resolution independent format that is entirely portable (supporting embeddable fonts) that can handle complex layout like postscript?

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.

Re:"use Windows"??? What?

[SerpentMage]

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt...

As much as I like a Mac OS-X the problem is the CPU. The software support simply does not exist for the developer, even in Open Source. Often packages need manually compilation and manual tweaking. It got so frustrating that I gave up. Very few companies and Open Source products will have explicit support for Mac OS-X. Sad, but that is the truth...

I much prefer using LINUX on Intel since I can be productive fairly quickly...

Re:Reasons I hate PDF

[vi-rocks]

Am I the only person who absolutely hates PDF's?

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.

Re:Reasons I hate PDF

[Metrol]

The only question is, why would you _want_ to do that? The original document was more useful in most cases than the resulting PDF.

Although PDF can be used for collaborating on a project, that is not it's true purpose. It's meant to send a completed document from one point to another, as the author intended it to look.

Why not just send a .doc file? Because there's a darn good chance that the receiving end won't see the same exact document. Word will change the formatting of a document based on the local printer configuration. Page breaks where you don't expect them and such.

Also, if there's isn't a perfect sync between machines and the fonts in use, there becomes another formatting nightmare. The document's presentation changes drastically from what the original author intended.

PDF solves these problems, while also being truly cross platform at no cost.

the lack of any decent viewing software. (By decent, I mean the ability to use my colour preferences (because blinding white backgrounds are more evil than Bill Gates)....

PDF is meant to present what the original author meant for the document to look like. It is not a word processing format, nor is it meant to replace HTML. It exists to transfer a complete document from one point to another, and have it look identical no matter what the platform.

...the ability to search, to copy text to the clipboard, to scroll off the bottom of one page and onto the top of the next, and to do all the other usual things you can normally do with regular documents that are a royal pain with PDF if they are even possible.)

Each and every one of these points are possible, and are built within every Acrobat Reader on all platforms. You may have tried Acrobat, but it sounds like you didn't take the time to actually learn how to use it.

If you're not truly desparate to see this information, go away

Care to share with the Slashdot community exactly what document format can be seen on Windows, Mac, and Unix? Oh, and it has to seemlessly provide font information, and print out the very same document no matter what platform or printer is used.

I'll save you the trouble. PDF is the only thing that fits that bill.

Re:Security Through Obscurity

[ninewands]

Quoth the poster:

The best Microsoft invention is the mouse-with-scroll-wheel.

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 ... and, while I'm at it, I think I'll cough up a couple of kudos for ODBC ... hmmmm ... funny thing ... the only OPEN standard Microsoft ever proposed and it took over the world of client-server database communication protocols ... it didn't help SQL Server sales much, though, because SQL Server REALLY sucked back in 1993.

And this is bad how?

[bgfay]

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."

I hate all these X's

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

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.

Re:Wow, that's stupid

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Actually, no. As well as Star/Open office ps/pdf support, there is Panda - A GPL'ed PDF generation library.

BePDF is also gpl.

Re:Nah - Is there PDF licensing?

[flossie]

Windows XP has apt-get?

Not by default, but it can easily be installed on a XP machine:

Obtain Debian CDs/DVD

Remove Windows (optional)

Install Debian

???

profit

PDF is it's own monopoly

[Felinoid]

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.

France? How Silly - Re:Monopoly Abuse?

[FacePlant]

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 last reply

[abulafia]

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.

Re:My last reply

[evilviper]

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.

Mozilla automatically reduces the space between each letter to it's minimum. In other words, the font spacing is not a fixed size. Now, if you did not want that, you can specify exactly how much spacing you want. Like I said, precision down to a single pixel.

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.

No, that is not the reason... That is simply your opinion.

The nature of Postscript is that it displays the same everywhere.

Despite the direction this is trailing off to... This was my original point. You CAN make an HTML page that looks exactly the same everywhere. That is assuming that the browser does not have any settings that override the page's setting (e.g. forcing a font, color, style sheet, etc.)

Re:Nah - Is there PDF licensing?

[einhverfr]

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?

clue for the clueless

[twitter]

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.

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.