Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft to Introduce PDF competitor 'Metro'
RustNeverSleeps writes "Computerworld reports that Microsoft will be including a new document format called 'Metro' with Longhorn. Apparently, Metro is intended to be a competitor to Adobe's PDF and Postscript formats. The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML. Can we expect Microsoft to do this right? If they do, I think it could be a good thing." Reader gsfprez is less optimistic: "... I noticed the main, and probably most important difference between old and busted PDF and new-hotness Metro (besides the Queer Eye styled name)... 'We will offer products based on this next generation RIP technology and make them available under license to printer manufacturers and software integrators worldwide.' Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files. Good luck with that, guys."
If royalty free licenses were enough to get open source reimplementations out of legal murkiness, then no one would be complaining about Mono. I'll suspend judgement on this one until we see what the terms of the license are and what patents Microsoft holds on it.
Or maybe that's the plan.
Christ, Microsoft is like my boss - he takes on a million projects and finishes none.
The splash screen to Win2K is a bitmap obviously blown up by 200% or so. Powerpoint can't correctly import encapsulate postscript. Can they do a graphics format correctly? I doubt it.
I think they are a bit late in the game, given that most people are used to PDF and have PDF reader installed already. It's like Firefox, sure it made IE dropped below 90%, that's still a tiny splash and I don't think it will have the chance to become the majority.
Why has it become to stylish to be Metro now?
The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML. Can we expect Microsoft to do this right?
No. Royalty-free licensing still allows them to place restrictions. And as for XML, so what? Word documents are in XML format, but the XML only encapsulates a bunch of stuff that's still proprietary and inaccesible. Lastly, the last thing anyone needs is another document format owned by a monopoly.
We will offer products based on this next generation RIP technology and make them available under license to printer manufacturers and software integrators worldwide.' Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files.
Surely that's the same strategy Adobe uses. Adobe Acrobat Professional, for example? Just guessing here...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Adobe fears MS?
They spend nearly $4Billion to buy Macromedia, and MS comes out with the half-crap document format??
Honestly now, someone go slap some sense into Adobe, MS will never be able to make even a dent in Adobe's market share.
Although PDF's have proven quite prevalent and useful, I would be happy if Microsoft presented a solution, simply because Abobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 has been a royal pain in the ass to use.
I can't imagine how many man-hours have been lost due to Acrobat Reader 6.0 crashing numerously, in addition to the long load times full of useless plugins.
Acrobat Reader also is a huge memory hog, and remains in memory after closing it! Die fast, and Yippee ki-yay, stupid Acrobat Reader!
At least Microsoft will have the sense to make it load fast and without crashing innumerably...
There's nothing wrong with PDFs. I can create and open PDFs easily and speedily in OS X with Preview.
Acrobat Reader, however, is like an eighty year old woman behind the wheel of an otherwise useful and speedy automobile. Why does Preview take a a matter of milliseconds to do what takes Acrobat fifteen seconds or more?
Oh yeah, there's no dobut that Metro is going to be Trusted Computing Friendly.
Conked (W3C-CSS), Embrace (WinMedia-DRM), Hijack (MIT-Kerberos), engulf (Active Directory), and discard (NetBEUI).
How about open, free (as in beer) for a change?
How *dare* you suggest the possibility that M$ ever do anything right!
An XML-based PDF-alternative is a good idea. However, a format is not "open" if it is "available for licensing". "Available for licensing" implies that the creator of the format retains some control, and that is not acceptable, no matter who the company is that created the format.
Microsoft seems to have trouble with the concept of "open"; perhaps that's not too surprising, since Sun, traditionally one of the strongest proponents of open systems and formats, has developed trouble in their understanding of "open" as well since they came out with Java.
It doesn't matter if we from the outside can see the complete nuttiness of switching a pdf-based workflow to a MS-the-root-of-all-evil-based workflow. This will succeed, just as Word has succeeded to be the de-facto document standard in every organisation and corporation out there, it's from the same guys who does the rest of the complex shit inside my harddrive. I hear management people saying 'synergetic effects' and we all know what happens when they use that language. Common sense is out the door and stupidity is governor.
They won't need it. It will succeed, and in about 7 years Linux will finally support it.
Looks down at shoe, frowns...
Wait...
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
And just recently, when Adobe aquired Macromedia, slashdotters everywhere had to ask: why?
One of Adobe's flagship products (bonus points for naming the other), will now be directly threatened by M$, and so it must do its best and diversify.
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
As an end user, I look forward to any replacement to PDFs. Adobe is one of the most bloated, terrible peices of garbage installed on my computer, and if it wasn't for the fact that so many government agencies were duped into using it, I'd throw it out.
I honestly don't see why it's needed in the first place. But if people and orginizations think they need something like that, hopefully Microsoft's offering won't be so crummy.
The Internet is generally stupid
how many Windows based companies end up being a competitor to MS. Then the same company stays and competes in MS's backyard, with their billions of dollars that they can afford to lose, and thinks that they can win! Such companies as Intuit (who has only one product that is profitable; turbo tax), Adobe (who will come under extreme pressures from MS as MS includes more of their new stuff in Windows for free), Oracle/SAP (who will soon be competing against a reved up MS with all sorts of Business software available for free).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As optimistic as my submission may have sounded, I worry that Microsoft will somehow make it so that "Metro" is hard for third-party developers to properly write support for. Microsoft can afford to do this, because the vast majority of people will just use whatever program it is that MS themselves provide with Longhorn to deal with "Metro" files, meaning it could be widely adopted even without excellent third party support.
However, if they make all aspects of it truly open, and it has real advantages over PDF, especially in consistency of appearance across systems, I'll welcome it.
metrosexual?
get a free laptop
I fail to see the need for yet another inferior format. This is going to be .ogg all over again. Sure it's ok, but nobody will use it. We have all the formats we need:
.mp3 .jpg if compressed and .tif if not .doc .pdf
Music is
Images are
Editable text is
non-editable articles are
We don't need no stinking new formrats.
Go fuck yourselves.....
In other news:
to do list:
1. develope technology so that every MS product can be reverse engineered and used for free...
2. release said tech to internet...
"ML only encapsulates a bunch of stuff that's still proprietary"
The problem wasn't that they stuck proprietary stuff in the XML, the problem was they applied for a patent on the XML schema itself.
They will probably do the same for this format to prevent competition. Why the patent office grants obvious stuff like this is beyond me.
We had that sucker out here in Australia as well... small ugly and totally useless for large people. I dont think that we had the square steering wheel though. Or I am just having nightmares from my days in the UK a couple of years back now...
*** I had a
If Apple or RMS had done this you would all be worshiping at their feet. It doesn't matter whether the product is good or not, MS bad, everybody else good.
It's still shitty as hell, but at least it isn't Adobe Reader 6...
"Bill Gates aims his "new-hotness Metro" at Adobe."
Uh...
and it's XML?
I'm not holding my breath either
Can we expect Microsoft to do this right?
rofl
Please stop looking at Adobe, look we have this new thing that's better, well it's going to be better. someday. we promise. no really. why are you laughing? stop laughing.
PDF files are obsolete. What's the point of Metro then?
what a troll you are, not only linux _users_, but also mac os users and many others wont use longhorn. most importantly windows 9x and xp users. i see about a dozen bfu computers a week. most of them still use win 98. what is a chance of upgrading to longhorn there? zero.
Deliriant isti Americani.
I think Microsoft feels it's important to do this because PDF is becoming a truly universal format, and they want to jump onto the bandwagon without giving Adobe any credit in any way for it.
Now, PDF is a first-class file format in OS-X, and OpenOffice can create them fairly easily. Building PDF capability into Word must strike Microsoft as being just a little too interoperable.
The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML.
Um, the words "open" and "licensing" are not compatible. Not in my book leastways.
Can we expect Microsoft to do this right? If they do, I think it could be a good thing.
How come? What is there that Metro can do that PDF, or for that matter Word combined with Wordviewer, can't? I guess it would be nice to have OS support for a portable document format, but does Microsoft really have to invent an entirely new format to do that?
Seriously Microsoft, with your thousands upon thousands of talented (paid) programmers and with the deadline of Longhorn constantly being pushed back, is it at all possible for you to do something that is not
a) Reinventing the wheel
b) Taking someone else's idea and repackaging it
c) 100 steps behind what open source is already doing.
d) Inconsequencal to your only major release, Longhorn.
So what if Longhorn introduces a new document format? Within 5 minutes of running it I bet we'll all find something MS could of spent better their time on.
'nuf said ;-)
Insert
..it could be cut with a knife. Here is Microsoft, long time producer of completely closed formats to quelch all possible competition (.doc, anyone?), who are clearly hypocritical. MS is simply riding off the back of other OSS formats, and attempting to reap the reward now they have seen that said formats have done well for others. If open source formats are so good, why don't they open .doc? Because it's so entrenched, and it's pretty well the only thing standing between Office and FREE alternatives. I understand that Microsoft is a company, but they are not helping in the development of the Internet.
I don't see why they wouldn't adopt an existing standard... oh wait...
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, let me state that first.
But the way this story ends,
Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files. Good luck with that, guys
is just like firing the starting gun for the "Let's see if I can post the wittiest anti-M$/anti-licensing/anti-whatever" race. Was the last bit really neccessary? Not really. And its not like Adobe doesn't charge for the ability to CREATE pdf's, this policy isn't new. Sure, there are open source programs for making PDF's, and I'm sure if this takes off, the format will be cracked and open source projects will be made.
But back to my point not everyone on Slashdot is of the opinion that Microsoft sucks. I'm sure the net statistics show that a large percentage of Slashdot users use Windows (and please don't give me the phony SlashPole data) Heck, if nobody used Windows than why would anyone submit stories about it?
I know everybody here likes to jab at them, I'll admit it, it's quite easy.
In the end this will probably be shot down or ignored but I take solice in knowing that those who shoot it down are probably using Windows while they post.
And by the way, don't compare this to Mac's Preview, Preview does something..it Previews documents, its not used for creating them and they didn't try to make a new format, they just made a reader for pre-existing ones.
I don't know if this will catch on or not, and I don't really care.
What bugs me about this is that MS is the largest software company in the world, with a huge research budget, and one of their best ideas is to come up with an alternative to existing de jure standard. Is this really the best use of R & D resources?
Come on people, there are real and interesting problems to be solved in software development and usability...use your powers for good.
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
That's like asking if it's better to give or receive an STD.
I cringe every time I have to read a manual for a router, microcontroller, or whatever in PDF format. Half the problem is the format, the other half is the lame reader.
The PDF reader is 200% better than it was a few years ago, but it still sucks.
Doing something better should be easy. Even Microsoft should be able to pull it off.
Maybe Bill Gates and George Bush can then have a mutual masturbation session about how the greatest forces on the planet managed to somehow defeat the underdogs.
Reminds me of Microsoft's foray into colour management. They tried to do it there way and control the market and the market told them to piss off. I think the prespress area is the last untouched market that Microsoft hasn't been able to (effectively) compete in.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Prob. XML-Word.
.pdf files in Exploder, as long as you have Reader - You can also open Word Documents in Exploder as long as you have Word loaded.
If this were a straight XML format, any XML compatable program would be able to open the files nad print them (aka render them) properly. However, it's more likely a "word viewer" type program that "reads" the XML/propritary output from word.
Hint #1: You need a license to use it. If it were proper XML, you would not need one (at lease from M$)
Hint #2: They opened the document with Exploder. Aside from the fact that you can open
Hint #3: They have been working on this for almost two years. That's about as long as they have been working on obscuficating XML for Word 2003 files;)
So does the license say "no linux development allowed" or what?
with Apple's adoption of PDF as the display system on Mac OS X?
Why is Microsoft going after this market? It doesn't make sense to me.
A program that will likely run slower and crash more often than Acrobat is exactly what I needed in my life.
It won't matter for short documents, but for large documents XML will have problems with random access.
PDF is very carefully laid out so that you can perform random access to the document and even download only those parts which you wish to read as you read them.
The offsets are a bit of a nusiance for the code that writes PDF, but aside from that it's a very clean format.
Beyond that, XML encoded documents will be larger. One would think that a gzip type encoding would thrive on the intense repetition in XML tags, but in practice they have a pretty signification impact on compressed file size. PDF is a terse encoding to begin with and supports zipping internally so it is invisible to users, plus the random access still works on the zipped content.
I'm more than willing to assess the merits of the two formats when both of them are real, but for now my money is on the format designed for efficient encoding and access to documents rather than the one designed to use the trending encoding format of the decade.
>Acrobat Reader, however, is like an eighty year old woman behind the wheel of an otherwise useful and speedy automobile.
I have a better question; why isn't there an obvious way (any way?) to bookmark a file and page?
My browser can do it. It's trivial.
Now I have to create a short-cut to the file, then each time I close down Reader, I have to rename the shortcut to include the page I was on. Then when I load the file up, I manually read off the page number and jump there.
Anyone else think this is MAJORLY FUCKED?
(also, if it could stop saying "This document contains JavaScripts. Do you want to enable JavaScripts from now on? The document may not behave correctly if they're disabled." EVERY TIME I CLOSE DOWN THE READER it would be much appreciated. Thanks)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Parent used "M$" - that is an automatic +5 Insightful!!!
Wasn't there a British car called the Metro - small, ugly, and had a square steering wheel (I'm not making this up)?
Wasn't that a Yugo? Those cars were so cheap that the CD player skipped every time the speedometer hit 55 MPH.
This is typical Microsoft. Add another pointless file format when there OS currently lacks support for many other common formats including PDF, PS, Flash, bzip, gzip, tar, jpeg2000, etc, etc. Maybe they should spend time fixing this rather than adding yet another feature that nobody needs or wants.
I want to scream whenever I have to use a PDF that I can't fill in on the computer. Because of the retarded limitations they place on the viewer, the form *must* be set up for document input when it's created.
It's true: when you create a PDF you can specify the fields that the user is able to fill out on the computer *before* printing it out. But of course, nobody *ever* takes the 30 seconds it takes to do that. A typewriter would do the job great - but that seems counterproductive.
So I have to print the bastard out, fill it in with tiny handwriting since no fucker ever thought to make the boxes big enough to actually write in ("but it looks big enough for text on a screen", they say) - then mail it off to whatever corporate behemoth requires the paper trail.
In summary: PDF seems to be fine if the author desires handwritten forms. As someone who has to fill the damn things in, I HATE them! It seems as though Microsoft would almost have to work hard to make the same mistakes.
Trying to take the spotlight (TM) away from Tiger, perchance?
There is already a non-proprietary XML-based document language specified by the W3C - it is called XSL-FO (where XSL == the usual and FO == formatting objects).
Additionally an open source XSL-FO -> PDF converter exists: Apache FOP.
It is a good idea to be wary of licenses that are royalty free. Every document that has a license, free or not, allows Microsoft, or any company that owns that license to have a foothold in your life.
You don't have to pay for MetroReader version 1 or 2, but MetroReader version 3 might not be free, and they also might change the format slightly, and suddenly you're a Word '97 user in a Word 2000 world.
And then guess what? You have to wait for OpenMetro to reverse engineer the format so you can read Metro documents without MetroReader, because Microsoft decided not to freely license the format to Sun Microsystems.
PDF is here, it's open, it works well, it's already integrated into many businesses, and regardless of how much you hate Adobe Reader, the format itself is good. There's no reason to switch.
A Yugo hitting 55?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
After all Adobe & Microsoft are indeed competitors. This might even explain latest Macromedia buy out.
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
hhahaha.. couldn't help it! I'd bet $$$ that the marketting people will use some queer-eye angle.
Anyway, come on, anything has to be better than Adobe Acrobat 7! Christ, it's a hell of a toss up between the evils of supporting a M$ technology or the hassles with Acrobat 7! Have you tried to uninstall the toolbar!????!! doh!
An ultra small car, but pretty impressive MPG, even for 1997. I wouldn't dare drive this on a highway, but if you live in a city, wouldn't be a bad car to get around inexpensively. If you want a newer and roomier car, a Volkswagon Jetta would be a better choice.
It clearly states:
This article alone does not support a theory that Microsoft is licensing Metro. In this article, Global Graphics is doing the licensing of their products. It seems the Microsoft licensing was poorly derived from this quote from the Global Graphics exec.
So tell me how this is going to work in a Studio-print environment.
You've got all of these Mac operators, busily using Adobe Indesign and sending print ads out to magazines and newspapers in the required eps or hi-res PDF format (that MUST be generated by original Adobe products for QA purposes). Then along comes Metro and this somehow competes with Adobe.
How? Adobe make no money from Adobe reader and for the creation of PDF's for the non-publishing industry there have been numerous free (gratis) and/or alternative tools for years. Is Microsoft going to create a killer design tool as well? And for the Mac to boot, coz those graphic artists aint going to swap.
No. What will happen is this becomes just another Microsoft feature that no other platform/tool will be able to support and we will have yet another reader that we have to load up...
An MS-generated document format. Does anyone here seriously believe that there'll be a Linux version of it? If you do, I want some of whatever chemical you're altering your reality with.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
/Just sayin'
It's all bloody frasiers fault! God damn I love that show, they act like such prissy pansies! There is a classic comment in the show from their dad that goes like:
"I still say that a couple of years in the army would have toughened you boys up" after they were talking about egyptian cloth blankets or some such shit..
On both the OS X and Windows version of Adobe Reader 7.0, you get a huge speed up if you remove all the useless plug-ins.
To do this on the OS X version, just right click/CTRL click on "Adobe Reader 7.0" and select "Get Info". In the plugins section deselect everything except Search.AcroPlugin.
To do this on the Windows version, just move the unwanted plugins from "c:\program files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\Plugins" to "c:\program files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\Optional".
In both cases, if you end up needing one of the plugins that you removed, then just put it back!
Microsoft's track record may not suggest that they are ideal for producing this kind of format and doing it right. However, I think they're well equipped to make way better reader software than Acrobat. Think about the Windows Picture and Fax viewer in XP, then think about using something as light and functional as that instead of Acrobat. If nothing else, this might be inspiration for Adobe to get their reader up to snuff.
If you think you're a hardcore roleplayer, come prove it to us at ArmageddonMUD.
Looks like my comment from the other day is correct: Adobe has many reasons to be paranoid as Microsoft would like to steal their market and, again!, monopolise the DTP and prepress market.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Decent printers support postscript, which is well supported in the various opensource OS's,
If M$ can take PS out of printers, or make PS printers, more of a niche item, then they can attack Linux,etc,buy
making it prohibitive to print, right now they own the cheap consumer marker, but imagine if there were no
PS printers -- PDF isnt the big deal, its the part about replacing PostScript, with something they own, and won't, won't, be
giving it away to the opensource world via GhostScript.
Microsoft - Reinventing the wheel, one program at a time.
Firstly, Microsoft was dealing with a universal format - HTML. Sure, they may have buggered it up or extended it, but BOTH Netscape and Microsoft needed to deal with that format. In this case, Microsoft is trying to introduce a new format that noone has adopted yet. I don't think it's going to fly - people have too much invested in Adobe's PDF and PS formats.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
HP's widely supported Printer Control Language?
It's called OASIS, but you probably think of it as "OpenOffice". Now here's a tough question: why didn't Microsoft simply adopt OASIS? (-: There are even working implementations available (called OpenOffice and KOffice) to get them started. :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
build it right deep into the os and ms is settled
Or is this? I just start to wonder how paid Microsoft PR people are here on Slashdot with the aim to push such articles trough? Because OS X is out? Because Apple is gaining ground?
:)
I just wonder
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
While the metro was described by Jeremy Clarkson as the perfect car if "you're called Mavis and going into town to buy mackeral", they did produce the MG Metro 6R4, which certainly wasn't street legal and looked something like: http://website.lineone.net/~burndred/metro/metro2. jpg
3 litre V6 engine in a car the size of a Yugo? Vroom vroom. I had the 1 litre "city" model. Impossible to drive at more than 90 mph, if it ever did get that fast down a hill.
PDF sucks. Hardcore dude. The files are too large, it isn't quite as portable as Adobe wants you to believe, and the inclusion of JavaScript may ran as the number 1 stupid thing ever done to a file format. I mean, what the fuck?
But - it's (mostly) a PostScript subset, it's good at random access, it's a vector format that allows me to copy and paste text from the document, and it is at least more portable than everything but a pure image format. It's an open format, no weird licencing issues, and Adobe has some vested interest in making it work everywhere (like Sun and Java).
If MS can retain the pros of PDF and eliminate even one of the cons, I'd be there with open arms. But they have a culture and history of lock in, and "royalty free licencing" is not the same as "open".
PDF blows. Looks like Metro blows harder.
OpenOffice 2 and KOffice already uses it.
Some of the info may be superfluous for view files, but then a subset of it might be in order.
Royalty free and open and a contender as a EU official standard.
Of course, Microsoft should extend the ways that viruses can use for spreading with Metro/PDF files.
I'm surprised nobody recognized this as Fire and Motion yet.
The big question here is why do they want another document format?
While I agree that Microsoft Office needs to be able to export to an open format, so that users of Microsoft Office can share documents with others, Microsoft might as well just make Office able to export to PDF and save themselves the trouble of inventing a new document format.
Most people already have a PDF-viewer which are available for free on most plattforms. To save users from downloading a viewer they could instead bundle a PDF-viewer. I like the route they've taken with antivirus and firewall-softeware where they've left third-party developers a slot to insert their software. That way they can deliver a good feature, push Adobe into a smaller market and avoid being sued.
Does Metro offer functionality does PDF does not?
I expect that an alpha version of "Shorthorn" will get pushed out the door in December just to justify claims that it was ready in 2006. The only way for MS to gain marketshare over PDF would be to leverage their desktop monopoly to break into that new market currently occupied by PDF.
Even if the licensing were just a rubberstamp issue (which it probably isn't) with MS giving the nod till all who request it (which it probably won't), dealing with the paperwork is an unreasonable hurdle and PDF still wins. Publishing is about reaching your audience and that's where a freely available, documented format like PDF comes in. Yes, it's owned by Adobe, but anyone can implement a writer or a reader. Metro fails on that due to licensing restrictions.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
OASIS is evil. As the grantparent says, Sun has trouble understanding Open Source. How could they come up with an Open document format?
They are under pressure to open up the .doc format. At some future point it might even become an anti-trust/monopoly case.
So, they come out with a totally new format, open it up, probably have support for it in MSOffice (or maybe not) and continue to maintain and increase the stranglehold on their dominant format with no fear of having to open it up anymore.
Speculation, speculation, speculation. No one really knows what the licensing scheme of Metro will be (probably not microsoft either). This article and comment tree is just another giant slashdot troll.
sorry for trolling myself.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Documents with DRM and Time limits?
There already is an XML based WYSIWYG document format that does everything PDF does and more, the W3C's open standard, SVG.
SVG already works with all Windows programs.
It's clear that Microsoft is again ready to apply its usual tactic, i.e. create something 100% similar to what a competitor does, provide it for free and then take the market over. We've seen it with Internet Explorer, with C#, and now with PDF.
Resistance is futile.
If this were a straight XML format, any XML compatable program would be able to open the files nad print them (aka render them) properly. However, it's more likely a "word viewer" type program that "reads" the XML/propritary output from word.
From TFA: "users will be able to open Metro files without a special client. In the demonstration, a Metro file was opened and printed from Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Web browser."
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
So not only does Microsoft push it's ways around the software industry, it also has to start affecting the very fundamentals of our society.
My guff is the name "Metro"
metro
n : electric underground railway
How about they create their own name for their format that doesn't have to rely on complicating the English dictionary even further.
Since when was an underground train and a bunch of documents the same thing? Windows had some sort of metaphysical relationship, you had little windows. Windows of space, windows of opportunity, windows with things in them. Apple Computers has an Apple (representative of fruit) so that you at least can relate to the word.
I could be preaching to a deaf audience, but I truly believe that linking so many things to single words just starts erroding our language basics. I truly think we could do a far better job of respecting our naming conventions in the real world and actually create naming conventions in the virtual world.
Let me use the Portable Document Format for example. It's called Portable Document Format. Good for that. That's what it is. Very long name, but it makes sense and it is not contradicting the diction rules. "PDF" is fast 3 letters to punch in on the keyboard. Sounds Peedee Eff.
Peedee Eff doesn't exist in English. It's not even English restricted. French sounds "Pay Day Eff". Sure the derivatives do come from the English title "Portable Document Format" but those derivatives ("PDF" spoken) do not intentionally override the language base.
Final line is: Don't let corporations define what your world is. Let your world define what corporations are.
Better yet, a Yugo with a CD player? Where? In your lap?
Its a shame that Microsoft cant bring its self to licence technologies like every other company has to.
What it is/does
Info from DJVUZONE:
DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") is a new image compression technology developed since 1996 at AT&T Labs to solve precisely that problem. DjVu allows the distribution on the Internet of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu allows content developers to scan high-resolution color pages of books, magazines, catalogs, manuals, newspapers, historical or ancient documents, and make them available on the Web. . . . and white documents. Scanned pages at 300 DPI in full color can be compressed down to 30 to 100KB files from 25MB.. Black-and-white pages at 300 DPI typically occupy 5 to 30KB when compressed. This puts the size of high-quality scanned pages within the realm of an average HTML page (which is typically around 50KB).
How to get it
Viewers are available for Win/Mac/Linux.
The Linux package DJVUlibre allows both viewing and DJVU document creation and is Open Source. It is available for most major Linux distros, source, Solaris, cygwin and may be available for automated installation by whatever method your distro uses.
LizardTech (ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION) provides the free downloadable Mac/Win viewers, and sells Win/Mac DJVU creation tools. (either above URL)
However, there are also free document conversion sites, upload various file formats (e.g. PDF, images) and get back .DJVUs.
Check it out.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Better yet, a Yugo with a CD player?
Actually, it was the radio that would skip stations. If Yugos did have CD players, it would probably skip or spit the disc back out.
it's OpenDocument since it was finished. actually microsoft at first participated in oasis workgroup but withdrew. wonder why :)
Rich
it's not sun singlehandedly who cerated this format.
. ph p?wg_abbrev=office
:)2 0_02 .php
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/membership
also koffice and other project actively participated in creation of this format (i think corel was mentioned, too, but i might be wrong on this)
ps. ok, i'm not totally wrong
http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis_news_11_
Rich
A few years ago, when Adobe canned Premier for the Mac on OSX because Adobe was all in a huff about Apple competing with them with Final Cut Pro, was the time when Adobe started developing primarily for Windows. Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 were superb on my WinXP laptop at work, but they sucked big, hairy, sweaty, donkey balls on OSX, being slow, not fitting in with the OS HI guides very well and above all, being drastically late to the platform.
At the time (Mac OSX 10.1) one could have had the distinct impression that Adobe had given up on the Mac platform and was only developing for those die hards in the pre-press and printing industry. And since then, Adobe has brought out new tools, such as that Audio app (ex Cool Edit Pro) which are Windows only. Even Acrobat, that bloated piece of pig fat, ran better on Windows.
Then, it seemed as if Adobe realised that OSX was surprisingly (to them and their utterly clueless marketing staff) making big gains rapidly, and lo and behold, The CS set is much better in its OSX integration.
But what makes me really laugh is that Adobe is suddenly being faced with a major competitor to one of its main cash cows (PDF is used in governments and official papers worldwide), and this by no less than Microsoft which has both the resources and the time to slowly bring printer makers to write drivers for it and to let it slowly gain acceptance. Microsoft is about the only company that can afford to let this Metro thing flop through three versions until it gains traction.
I bet you the people in Mountain View (Adobe), are crapping themselves. This could be one of the reasons they bought Macromedia, in order to have Flash as a barganing chip with MS.
There was an Austin (later Rover) Metro. It was as the parent says, but without the square steering wheel; that was in the Allegro.
OASIS and PDF don't really fill the same niche. Just like how Word's .doc format doesn't fill the same niche as pdf.
Why not fork?
MS never supported PDF because they wanted to lock everyone into using Word and its format(s) as the way to pass documents around. Never mind that it was a load of crap for such purposes, quality has never figured in MS's designs and probably never will.
So, now that MS has admitted that the world not only wants, but is using someone else's format (a nice, open format) are they going to get with the mainstream and give their customers what they clearly want? Fuck no. Microsoft didn't get where it is today by listening to customers: customers are there to milk via lock-in. Does the farmer ask the cows when they'd like slaughtered?
Instead they've decided, as usual, to tell the customers what they want: a new, propriety document format to solve all the problems they're currently solving with PDF.
In other words, just like Sparkle, Microsoft's response to the market is to pick another battle it can't win. To win, it would have to be addressing some lack in the current offering that has the potential to create a new market they can exploit, but the only lack is one MS sees: revenue from making portable documents. The rest of the world is already making them and has little interest in the "problem". So, basically, the market for Microsoft's new format is...Microsoft itself. So, who cares?
It's good to see Bill lose one occasionally.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
In firm slashdot tradition, I have not RTFA - however...
XML. For Page layout. Intended for printing.
So what makes this "Metro" anything other than a proprietary rehash of XSL:FO?!?
We're currently using it as a middle step between our own XML based documents and PDF, using FOP. Sure, FOP doesn't fulfil all of the spec, but the spec exists, and works well.
[root@GRIFFIN root]# rpm -e coffee-1.22.3-1a.i386.rpm
error: removing these packages would break dependencies:
It's called OASIS,
OASIS is a word processing format with markup and semantics. Its analog is MS Word or RTF.
PDF is a format for an exact reproduction of the appearance of documents. There is no equivalent open format.
What is new in this that isn't achieved by OASIS?
OK...for you kiddies out there; Way back in the 90s, Adobe charged an arm and a leg for Postscript ($1,000/printer) and Postscript fonts were expensive. Apple complained. Microsoft complained. Everyone buying a printer complained or wished for a cheap Postscript printer so !!#@$!$ would look right when they printed. Adobe held firm.
Apple decided along with Microsoft to change part of the problem...Postscript fonts. Jointly, they developed TrueType. Adobe held firm...till it was obvious that Postscript was in danger. Rates fell on Poscript licences, though it was too late and TrueType fonts became dominate.
Adobe retrenched and created the Postscript offshoot PDF...and documents became printable and portable again. Adobe became more involved in the detailed document creation process.
Fast forward to now. Microsoft (by themselves) are attempting to complete the job and take Adobe out of the document creation picture. It's not going to be hard for Microsoft to do it this time. Expect a suite of Metro document editing and processing tools from Microsoft around the time Longhorn is released.
The only gift in this? You now have a year and a half to two years to plan.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Am I the only one that sees the XP in windows XP as a disgusted smiley?
Genius!.... I think I love you
What is it supposed to stand for anyways?
'eXPerience'!
No, I *am* serious, unfortunately.
The whole name smacks of what would happen if one corporate type trying to come up with an 'urban' sounding name met with another who had just invented the most banal, homogenised, meaningless touchy-feely name ever, and the two of them invoked the powers of darkness to create a satanic offspring.
This foul child would then create the name 'eXPerience', and shorten it to XP.
Five years later, having infested various world governments, he would bring about the downfall of western civilisation.
Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
We will offer products based on this next generation RIP technology :-)
Does this mean that the technology is already dead
Maybe you could bypass the need for PostScript on Laser printers with Metro--sheesh, what a effed up name-- but to think that somehow Magazines and Newspapers are going to start laying out their products in Word when most of them use either Quark or InDesign or even Pagemaker???
Publishing divisions and Graphic Design departments have much power over what they use. And, it ain't gonna be MS. So even if MS puts out a Quark/InDesign killer for Idiots, designers are not going to bite. Especially if it isn't for a Mac. Especially, if it IS for the Mac!
Nah. And if you have ever worked with commerical printers, offset press, etc, you know they are particular about what you send them. A word doc ain't gonna cut it.
Maybe it'll work for taking it to Kinko's but it won't for every real print shop.
Old Media isn't going to change especially if it is to output old media.
The web? pfft. puhlease. unless MS can convince the gubmint that their products are more secure all the money in the world isn't going to knock PDF out of contention for portable documents.
PDF ain't going away.
I know metro is a printer description thing, for printers, but, eeeengh! Not likely to mean much in the short or the long term.
trust MS to invent something more sucky than Adobes
I wish it wasn't so slow. It even taunts you with how much crap it is doing.
...
"loading blahblah.api"
"loading someothercrap.api"
"initializing blah.api"
How bout just opening the file goddamit!!!!
There's an oxymoron if I ever saw one. I have absolutely NO trust in Microsoft anymore. They will introduce this, and push it like crazy to get it largely established.
Then they will pull the rug out on it and require all versions that are not authorized by Microsoft to be paying royalties and in some instances, denied if they don't explicitly run on a Windows box.
Liars, and damned liars they are...
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Err killing Adobe? But wasn`t Adobe buying Macromedia? http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobe andmacromedia.html
The plot thickens?
Oh my,gosh,where does it all lead?
PDF and DjVu address slightly different neads. DjVu is 'just' a fancy bitmap image format, specifically designed to give great results on multi-page documents. It's used for this purpose by Archive.org to display their collection of public domain books.
While some places do you PDF purely as an image container, it has a much wider scope.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
That would be 'do *use*', not 'do you'. Sigh.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
To be honest, I'd always assumed that the only reason Microsoft didn't provide a PDF export feature for Word was that the courts might rule them as being anti-competitive all over again. After all, if Microsoft Word were able to bundle a PDF export tool, a lot of users would suddenly have no reason to pay lots of money to Adobe.
This is all despite the fact that it would make logical sense for a Word Processor to be able to export to a consistently laid out format.
Word isn't a very impressive page layout application, but it's still "good enough" for a lot of tasks. Allowing it to export to PDF would completely undermine much of Adobe's business plan, and that wouldn't look good at a time when Microsoft has been trying to be very careful about encouraging its monopolistic image.
Personally, I'm wondering if Microsoft sees an advantage in competing with their own format rather than just using one that someone else invented. Assuming it beats PDF, perhaps Microsoft hopes to argue that it's winning because it's a better format rather than because it's bundled with the operating system... which would be a much more likely conclusion if they had simply bundled a PDF export tool.
Free to printer manufacturers? And open does not equal free.
Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, Gates should just buy them and get it over with.
There are still more people running Win98/Win2000 than WinXP, especially in business environments. Anecdotally, the folks I know aren't at all interested in 'upgrading' to Longhorn as they don't see any pressing need to spend yet more money and time on another round minor improvements (the same reasoning that deterred them from upgrading to WinXP). The only places I can see Longhorn making any dents are a) with new computer buyers where it comes pre-installed, and b) the MS worshippers who immediately jump on anything and everything that MS puts out.
Note that these aren't businesses, the people who put out the vast majority of PDF documents. I don't think Adobe has anything to worry about in the near future.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
This comment is not about the articles. Instead I have to say that I liked the way that slashdot's editors weaved two different viwes together to spike everyone's attention. Pro M$ vs other M$ opinions. I have to confess that I'm less than optimistic about Microsoft's benevolence. Although it wasn't pointed out in the teaser I'm sure that many slashdotter's haven't missed the opportunity to point out the difference between free as in beer (at least until MS gains dominance) and free as in unencumbered and available to all.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
If the OS had an automated method to install and configure third party apps like RedHat's kickstart or equivalent, then it would be less of an issue. But as it is now, a re-install on MS-Windows weighs heavily against third party applications and their protocols and formats.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
easiest to quote, I rearranged the text order a bit to highlight the most obvious and important difference.
From What's Inside DJVU
In short, DjVu is a multipage document format that can use a number of different coder/decoders (codecs) to compress the individual chunks that compose an images or a page. In fact, DjVu is really four compression techniques wrapped into one format:
BZZ: A general-purpose data compression technique similar to bzip2. Bzz is used to compress searchable text layers and other metadata in DjVu documents.
and that's what makes it more than just another compressed bitmap format like .JPG)
DjVuPhoto (aka IW44): A progressive, wavelet-based lossy compression format for continuous-tone images (i.e. photos and pictures).
DjVuBitonal (aka JB2): A lossless or lossy compression technique for bitonal (black & white) or palettized images that is particularly effective on images with repeated shapes (such as documents images where the same character appears many times in the document).
DjVuDocument: A technique for scanned color document that separates images into a foreground layer that contains the text and line drawings, and a background layer that contains the pictures and background textures. The foreground is encoded with DjVuBitonal and the Background with DjVuPhoto.
and that can really make for small files with big impact. I once downloaded a map document that was a meg or two with DJVU, that decompressed to 100+ megs when I decompressed it into a bitmap. (I think it was the early 1900s map of Yellowstone on the djvuzone site somewhere) The text was sharp and clear in either document... as you know, legible text does not survive high image compression levels well in ordinary bit maps.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I guess it will be as open as MS Word exports to HTML are. Bunch of tags which only microsoft knows how to parse.
Lemme see: Not sure about XML, looked at http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-02-1998/jw-0 2-miko.html
"For example, because XML is a dialect of SGML, the content could potentially go directly into a publishable book format, provided it had the correct DTD..."
Subset of SGML: check
Used to define data & can be extended without breaking standard: Check
Used for OpenOfficeDocuments: Check ( http://xml.openoffice.org/ )
My point is that MS word documents will open in explorer as long as the correct software is loaded on the computer. To whit, I just spent two hours watching people open word documents from a collaboration site in Explorer. If they did not want to open them in Explorer, they had to save them to disk, and then open them. At Home, where I only have OpenOffice, the documents will be opened with Open Office because explorer does not have hooks to use the Open Office program to display the word documents.
Just because you can open a document in Explorer does not mean that the document is not in a propitary format.
...and have you seen version 7 of Acrobat reader? It takes about 20 minutes to install, and comes packed with photo album software and the Yahoo toolbar.
It's the battle of the minds, and everyone's unarmed.
What is with Microsoft and their Not Invented Here attitude ? They have to create everything themselves. No wonder it takes ages for them to get something out. 5 years is a ridiculous time between major operating system releases (assuming Longwait comes out next year).
:)
Oh well. Tiger should arrive on friday for me
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
Actually, I was mildly pissed when I found out about the name... I was looking for a business name at the time and... well, that became not a choice.
But you've just compared a complete storage system encompassing fonts, vector graphics, images, form fields and the whole kitchensink - with an image compression app.
This appears to describe more than that, and describes metadata capability that sounds like it could handle the functionaliy you describe if anyone wanted to standardize a format that would fit within the DJVU container.
Depends on what you need a document format for. If I want to put complete job information for a print run into a document and e-mail it to a printer, of course a PDF is the format of choice. That's what printers are set up for, and that's certainly reason enough.
If I want to display via browser plugin or download a big document, whether formatted print or image or the combination of the two, djvu is the format of choice, if enough people can be persuaded to use it.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Is this kind of behaviour not covered by the anti-trust case?
1. Microsoft notices competition (Netscape/PDF).
2. Microsoft makes free alternative (IE/Metro).
3. Microsoft ships free alternative with every version of Windows.
4. Admins and PC manufacturers around the world don't do anything to counter Microsoft, fearing Microsoft retaliation.
5. Microsoft becomes more powerful, industry loses out. Again.
This is clearly designed to take market share and brand recognition away from Adobe and to de-value the PDF format. If Windows systems don't have a PDF reader installed (due to step 4), one (arguable) selling point of OS X has just been eliminated. Either way, interoperability has dropped and, as such, migration to Linux/OS X will likely be affected.
Surely Adobe, and possibly Apple, have grounds to complain?
And it would be nice if djvu was that open.
However, notice how there isn't a free software pdf to djvu converter or reverse. It would seem like an obvious tool. This site has one where you can upload it: http://any2djvu.djvuzone.org/
One exists but they can't legally distribute it. See here for details: http://djvulibre.djvuzone.org/gsdjvu.html
From that link:
"Lizardtech then discovered that the DjVuDigital license they have from AT&T is different. The main DjVu agreement requires Lizardtech to make an open source release of the DjVu Reference Library. The DjVuDigital agreement apparently prevents Lizardtech to distribute the source code of GSDjVu. Quite curious for a derivative of Ghostscript!
We contacted AT&T Intellectual Property (IP) division and we asked them to correct this apparently benign situation. Alas AT&T has been suffering much in the last few years. Workforce reductions are frequent and painful. Nobody in the IP division wants to do the work and take the risk to open source a piece of code that does not seem to be central to the company business.
For all we know AT&T does not even care about GSDjVu. There is no-one left in AT&T who knows the DjVuDigital code, let alone how to improve it. Were it available as part of DjVuLibre instead of rotting on a shelf, it could be used to help academics, librarians, researchers, scientists, and students disseminate knowledge and culture. "
There are licensing problems with djvu...
As long as I still can create PDFs directly from OpenOffice.org who really cares?
Oh, wait... you still use that other expensive, closed source, proprietary Office Suite?
As long as Microsoft still tries to be less compatible in order to mantain it's "status quo", they'll see their consumers move away to the stabilished open alternatives.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
This will be an interesting test. It isn't so hard to envision the Microsoft brainstorming session where they said, "Hey, I've got a brilliant new idea. Let's poison an existing standard with something incompatible!" But can their monopoly clout really take on .pdf at this late date?
Ghostscript brother will be Hetro ... We'll have to get used to stuff like htr resume.mtr ... And http://ilga.org/ will sue.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Some Indian programmers (renouned for their love of crap technology) will right a useful business software package using metro. It will become all the rage since it will be completely buzz word complient. Bingo...more Microshit in the enterprise and your job more easily outsourced because a non-citizen of the US made it happen and the CE0 got an few extra million in bone-us.
Great, now I know how they came up with the name "Longhorn." Thanks.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
Microsoft needs to realize that they can't dominate in every single file format and technology.
- cultavix -
They've fooled everyone before...
OH.. I personally don't want some shitty bloated XML document running around my harddrive. Zip compressing them defeats the purpose if you're going to edit them that way.
I once converted a binary format database into an XML format. It was originally 233kB, and bloated up to about 1.4mB. Maybe I should have used shorter tags, but they were already only 3 letters long. I find it to be pathetic when the overhead information for a type of file vastly outnumbers the CONTENT.
in this post, expect constant PR salvos from MS in the next two to three weeks, they'll do all kinds of crazy shit to stay in the news and to steal attention from the launch of Tiger-- this week, in the run-up to release day, and for the next week or two after, as people get their feet wet and those not privy to advance copies start posting reviews.
How aboud DVI. Yes, i know noone use it to distribute documents, but it is there :)
you can bet if Microsoft is involved they will get a license fee somewhere in the mix.
I suggest keep your documents pdf.
Microsoft tries to compete with EVERYTHING. Anything they can make a few pennies off of. I can't deal with a company that is THAT greedy. But at least they are semi-flexible with illegal copies of windows.
As far as this goes, I agree that there should probably be a new kind introduced to replace adobe. The issue is, it's microsoft who's trying. And I can't think of one thing yet that microsoft has done right.
http://www.6765656b.com it's the ~ for us geek's.
PDF is great but the those in the industry (HR people spring to mind) who should embrace it don't seem to. Recently, I sent a few resumes out in pdf format generated via pdftex (my resume has a nice look to it) and was asked 2/3 of the time to resend as a Word document! I'd rather send plain text than a Word document (it would be great if everyone used TeX :-)
Do they know the meaning of the word innovation?
One again Microsoft's strategy is:
1. Let someone else come up with a new product
2. Let it mature
3. Copy all the good ideas from it
4. Improve it and releasse it
5. Profit?!
I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files.
Given that it's MS doing it, there is a good chance that it will get some traction.
Think of it this way: on Windows, how easy is it to make PDFs? Qutie challenging given that you have to buy software from Adobe (or use OpenOffice). With Longhorn I'm betting that there will be a "Print to 'Metro'" option in every print dialogue (like PDF in OS X).
While this won't take over workflows everywhere, any person who wants to publish something in a read-only format, with fixed formating, will have the the option of shelling out cash to Adobe or using the built-in tools in Longhorn (and perhaps it will be backported to XP/2K). Guess which one people will use?
If Adobe wants to survive they'll release a very basic 'print to PDF' thing for Windows RSN. It doesn't have to be anything fancy (PDF 1.3, no forms or ICC suppport), but something.
While I'm not a big fan of PDF on the web, at the very least it's an open, documented, royalty free format which anyone can write an implementation for without having to shell out cash.
My CA$0.02.
It doesn't matter how open the format is. Once Microsoft starts adding thing like digital watermarks and signing other readers wont be able to read the files. At least Adobe actually ports their code to Linux. We can't expect this from Microsoft.
users will be able to open Metro files without a special client. In the demonstration, a Metro file was opened and printed from Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Web browser.
You're the fool if you think this makes it an open format. I guess you hadn't considered people on platforms which don't have Internet Explorer? I think they forgot to add 'on Windows' to that sentence. Telling isn't it.
We will offer products based on this next generation RIP technology and make them available under license to printer manufacturers and software integrators worldwide.'
Microsoft has been trying to get a foothold in the print industry for years, but they still can't get it right. Publisher is a pale imitation of layout programs like InDesign or QuarkXpress. When you set up a PostScript printer on a Windows machine you still have to go into its properties and tell it to make grayscale and black objects be grayscale and black, not RGB. TrueType fonts predominate on the platform, and despite improvements in the way the PostScript language handles them, there are still issues, including the non-embedding bit that is set in some of them. It seems to me that Microsoft never really "got" PostScript which is why their efforts in this direction have failed. The print industry has millions of dollars invested in PostScript RIPS and PDF workflows. If MS is seriously thinks they can replace that, they really don't understand the print industry.
And bloated. And buggy. And basically crap.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Wasn't this supposed to be called "XDoc" according to MS?
This fits into their current push of Microsoft Sharepoint (sharing doc's, backoffice solutions, E-Forms, etc, etc, etc). Some apps such as ActivePDF and LiquidOffice tries to implement a backoffice/E-Form solution but cost is another thing.
Last time I checked, its not cheap to update PDF's in a writeable format using Adobe's option. Yes, there are backoffice solutions, free software (pirated or not) and components that can plug into apps to create these files but again - not cheap and personally PDF's are just *another* format. Adobe is equal bloatware to Microsoft. XML is scalable, cheap, easy to develop and implement into any type of application running on nearly any type of OS.
The good thing about Adobe is that they have implemented XML schemas and Data Packages..
string.Empty();
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Netscape is just sooo good. Why would anyone use the crappy Internet Explorer. And why would anyone use Microsoft Office if Wordperfect Office is just better?
Wrong timeline. Sorry
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A competing document format pushed with Microsoft's clout sure will put some enormous pressure on Adobe.
If I were Microsoft, I'd make "Metro"
So how exactly would you, as a consumer, lose from all of this?
I just hope that the OSS movement doesn't try to support it. That will just give it more legitimacy. With Word documents you have to as they are so entrenched, but this is too new. Just let it die as another MS brain-dead idea.
To all the above
Here is the evidence from a survey by VALVE, supporting a massive switch over of people from 9x to XP.
Agreed its not everyone, but that is a figure of speech Commander Data.
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
Where is your evidence?
The fact is, PDF does serve a purpose but it is not an ideal format by any stretch.
.PDF and they don't match an application/x-pdf MIME type).
For those of us doing real work, many sites are now offering PDF "forms" that allow us to complete an online version of a traditionally printed form. Since the form must look exactly as intended, PDF is ideal for this. Unfortunately, it doesn't always function as designed. Some sites don't support Acrobat 7.0 while others require it, and depending on the HTTP content-type then newer versions of Acrobat will simply reject dynamically generated PDF's (they don't end in
To make matters even more frustrating, the ever-elusive PDF plugin is required. This means if you happen to not be at your computer, the first thing you need to do is install Acrobat Reader. I can assure you that when using a client's PC this is not always possible.
For this particular application, I think there is plenty of room for a new format. If Metro can support the same layout capabilities of PDF, and provide simplified XML representations that can run in a standard browser (Firefox, IE, etc.) without a plugin... Then MS might just be on to something.
Yet another difficulty is the automagical reformatting Acrobat does when you try printing a PDF. If will invariably auto-rotate and shrink-to-fit your document to the page, which is awkward when you are trying to produce something with very tight margins. While Acrobat 7 has addressed this issue, upgrades are not possible for everyone and sometimes you end up cropping pages.
Again... plenty of room for improvement here, especially for pre-press stuff that may need to get tweaked by a printer before a run.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
its just a negotiating tactic
licence your stuff to us and make a bit of money or we will kill your income stream with a new file format killing your PDF RIP & Acrobat
(intresting thing is Acrobat sales account for nearly as much as the whole "creative suite" photoshop et al )
MS are completly unable to produce a decent PDF RIP for windows !
MS want to write PDF's and have been in talks for a year now with adobe I guess it a new level in those "talks"
MS thinks that printer Manufacture's are going to incorperate this and not pay adobe for their RIP and yeah its possible that some low end might do it just witness HP and their printing comunication but HP size & time doing this plus where do they make money...
MS would have to provide these manufacturer's with the software as they are not good at this so MS will do a referance implmentation and those are always great...
welcome Microsoft to the printing world where they are Big Boys
sales are slow
they make alot of money off customer support...
regards
John 'RIP me' Jones
AAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
I FUCKING HATE PDF!!!
I hate loading that fucking bloated Acrobat
I fucking hate reading a page at a time. I'm on a fucking computer, not a book damit!
I hate the fucking page breaks. I hate the fucking page formatting. Because it is attempting to show me a book page instead of realizing there are better ways to read information on a computer I'm forced to either scroll left and right over the page making it fucking cumbersome to read OR I'm force to zoom in so that I can only see the top 1/2 of the page but I can read the text so now I see less info. If they'd just fucking use HTML I'd get so much more done.
I fucking hate that even though it claims be a solution to rendering the pages it fucks up all the time. If you can't even get your main objective working then fucking give up.
I get far far more usage from plan HTML files then I get from any PDFs. I wish PDF would DIE! And I don't need a replacement either. We already have the replacement, it's called HTML and it does just fine.
When Metroviewer is shipped with Longhorn and XPSP3, pdf producers will see that they can switch to Metro and the majority if their audience will need no extra software whatsoever.
This whole argument hinges on Longhorn and/or XPSP3 being widely deployed enough to make a difference. IE could muscle out Netscape because IE was running on a Windows version affordable and practical for everyone. With the kind of hardware requirements on Longhorn, coupled with the flurry of FOSS, how many people would actually be running Longhorn to use the monopoly enough for Metro ?
Also, about XPSP3, last I checked, many businesses are still really gunshy about installing XPSP2! Also, many machines are typically configured to download critical updates and not "feature" updates like Metro so I doubt if MS will make much of a dent into PDF since its not a battle akin to Netscape vs. IE any more.
Click on "Show as HTML" for a PDF document in Google search results, and you will see how unsuitable HTML is for representing formatted documents.
PDF is a format for describing formatted pages; HTML, DOC, and RTF are markup languages, something entirely different.
MS has tried to replace open standards before, eg: their attempt to replace HTML with "blackbird", javascript with VBscript, java with activeX and dot-net. Their success has ranged from at best sharing the top spot (dot-net and the windows media formats) to utter dismal rout (VBscript only gets used on intranets, and blackbird, who even remembers that?). There has never been an open internet standard fully supplanted by MS's closed one.
You think they'd learn, and quit wasting their time.
DjVu absolutely rocks when storing scans. I can scan 300dpi pages like a whirlwind and djvulibre tools crunch them into very, very small files while pretty much retaining the quality.
The only problem is that PDF is more than just a raster format - it's very suitable for storing stuff that was created on a computer, rendered directly from the application. DjVu is great for digitization of off-line material. Small differences...
I tried out Foxit, but it mangled some of the font display. Not as bad as what happens when you try and view a PDF produced via tex--dvips--ps2pdf file, but still not pretty. I wish I could use it---I loathe Acroreader bloat as much as the next fellow---but it was too much work to decipher the garbled text.
Ah, I remember what it was; it was on the Gentium type specimen. Barely legible, but certainly no good for evaluating a typeface.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm sorry, it's been a while and don't remember the details. But, please consider my experience, if you are wondering if msft can get this right.
My mother bought some e-book that was distributed in some msft proprietary formate. She couldn't figure how to open the thing, she called me, and I tried to help.
It was an ordeal like you wouldn't belive: my mom had to get some
The instructions were not where you would be expect them to be, and they were not straight forward. We had to try calling support, and starting all over, again and again. I believe it was a few weeks before my mom was actually able to open the book.
Who needs another msft proprietary format? We already PDF established as standard.
Maybe that will kill adobe and their shitty spyware which is included even in linux distributions! I sure hope Metro will drive Adobe out of business and then they'll either open source the acrobat or xpdf will take over.
There is somethis so right about Microsoft and "RIP technology" used in same sentence....
R.I.P. technology indeed. And for that matter innovation and choice too.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
I work in pre-press and over the last few years PDF has come to completely dominate, and make everybodys job a LOT easier. Microsofts awful attempt at a desk top publishing package "Publisher" is the single most awful piece of software I have ever encountered. I don't doubt the people who developed it have an incredible knowledge of software development and design, but their knowledge of commercial printing processes, professional design and pre-press technicalities is absurd to the point of insulting. The thought of the, perhaps flawed, but incredibly useful PDF format been superceded by a publisher like abberation makes me want to find a new job.
If Metro will let you embed videos?
It seemed important enough for Word.
Even though, it was something not so bad, why should we give them another chance? Hey, confidence is not there any more. I won't give a chance to someone who constantly tries to fool me. That isn't rationnal.
Yes, MS is a monopolist and the DOJ "settlement" makes a sick farce of the whole idea of "justice". No arguments there.
But the fact that you're forced to deal with their "sucky" products is that for most people they don't count as "sucky" at all. Or didn't count as "sucky" back when it mattered.
Or let me explain, via a long metaphor: something I keep hearing is some variant of "if number of users meant quality, MacDonald would be the best restaurant." Guess what? For a lot of people it is.
Being "the best" isn't a question of only technical implementation merits for an OS, nor of only cuisine for a restaurant. For the restaurant merits also include stuff like:
- price: there's a lot to be said about paying a couple of euro for a burger, instead of 10 times as much for 5-star cuisine.
- speed of service: maybe I don't have the whole bloody evening to wait while someone cooks an elaborate meal for me. I just want to pick a burger and walk away ASAP.
- availability. If I have to drive through half the city to get a 5-star meal, while a MacDonald's is just around the corner, trust me, I'll get a Mac every time.
Etc. There are about a dozen criteria which get to be a part of the final decision, not just one. And insisting that _one_ aspect is the best, is maybe good for flame-wars, but a piss-poor way to evaluate a RL product or service.
As I've said before, RL decisions are more complex than "MS is evil" or "MS sucks". RL decisions are _never_ perfect. They're the "best" _compromise_, among a bunch of crappy compromises. You don't just have one criterion and take the clear best fit there, you try to end up with the compromise which doesn't suck too much in any of the many real life criteria.
So let's judge MS in that aspect.
Nowadays, MS Windows is "the best" not by means of its technical merits, but by means of having almost all the apps. MS Office isn't "the best" by means of it's technical merits, but because the format is available and accepted virtually everywhere.
Like it or not, that's the market reality: between choosing a rock-solid Linux that runs about 1 in 10 apps I want, and a crappy Windows which runs them all, Windows wins every time. In a sense, it _is_ the "best" OS.
But let's think about how we got here. Think back in the day when the OS market really was still up for grabs and Linux didn't even exist.
Who was going to win? A fragmented and self-incompatible Unix world, which charged more for a license than a whole PC cost? Maybe OS/2 which (A) saw no advertising from IBM, (B) wasn't even pre-installed on IBM computers, and (C) still let an application lock up the whole system, and (D) didn't even try getting developpers and apps?
Let me tell you, I was a flaming OS/2 fanboy at the time. But even _I_, when I look back at the train-wreck-in-slow-motion that OS/2 was, I can only think: "OMG! Was I _that_ retarded back then?" Looking back in retrospect, OS/2 positively sucked compared to Windows. Maybe not on technical merits, but when you consider all factors, it sucked.
So you can probably see how MS won very easily.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What's the relationship between a scanned image format and a structured document format? I mean, PDF is already a couple of levels lower than I'm really happy with, but at least it doesn't turn text into unsearchable unextractable bitmaps.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&it em=4544414505
...
1980 AUSTIN ALLEGRO GREY £50.00 4h 41m
Ok guys ! 50 quids for a car 8)
Yu might even get some change back
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Last week, LaPorte opined that Adobe bought Macromedia to prevent Microsoft from buying it. This news only shows that Microsoft has its eyes set on Adobe. Maybe that was really Adobe's reason
Microsoft already has a PDF-like document format and a reader called "Microsoft Reader". It's targeted for PDAs, competing head to head with the mobile version of Acrobat Reader. It's based on an XML document format.
It's the least pleasant eBook reader I have ever used, bar none.
This bodes. This is just so chock full of boding it scares me.
From the tone of your voice, I suspect you meant to use the word "insignificant" where you used "signification".
In my experience, compressing XML does have a significant effect. In fact, this is the very first time I've heard of anybody saying otherwise.
I don't think so, I think the original sentance was supposed to be the only slightly corrected:
One would think that a gzip type encoding would thrive on the intense repetition in XML tags, but in practice they have a pretty signification impact on compressed file size.
What he is trying to say here is NOT that the compression you see from plain XML is insignificant. What he's saying is that even though the XML has tags that compress well, the presence of them still adds a very sigifincant amount of overhead even in fully compressed files.
You can think of PDF as essentially XML without tags (or with far shorter tags). Given any PDF and a Metro document with the same content, the Metro document is probably going to be a lot larger even when compressed.
I'm in agreement with the parent poster that there are distinct technicaly advanatges to PDF over any XML based format. I'm a big fan of XML and use it in a lot of places but really it's not meant for everything. What is more important really than a file being XML is the API to whatever file you have behaves like XML. It would be really interesting to see a library that was an XML "parser" that pretended like PDF's were XML and let you traverse/modify them with the same API.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All that work and I forgot to correct the sentence - I meant to say "signification" was supposed to be "significant" (as you would assume at first glance anyway).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder how many companies have firewalled off windowsupdate.microsoft.com to prevent XPSP2 updates?
Because the PDF format is so open, the entire print industry uses it. Most of the stuff you read in dead tree form was once a PDF. There are several ISO standards for print-ready PDF files, such as PDF/X1a:2003.
Many printers ( not the thing on your desk, the companies that print stuff ) have automated workflows built on PDF. You shovel single-page PDFs in one end, and software that understands that open PDF format looks into each file, determines its page number, places that single-page PDF on a digital "sheet" with other single pages ( called an imposition ), and sends it to a machine that makes printing plates. That platemaker understands the open PDF format and is able to image that "sheet" directly to a plate that is mounted on the press. Automated, without costly human hand-holding made possible because many pieces of software from many companies that are not named Adobe can program to an open standard.
PDF files can also contain JDF data. JDF is XML-based, and it can communicate ( or will communicate ) with many types of printing plant machinery. For example, many printers have robotic paper loading systems, so that imaginary job above that is PDF can tell the paper robot to load the specific paper for that job so that when the plates are loaded on the press, the press can begin printing. The JDF data within that PDF can also tell the paper cutter how to cut the sheets, and/or tell a folder how to fold the sheets.
All this because of how open the PDF format is. And Metro is going to replace all this, particularly with the momentum PDF already has? I think Metro is just a fancy WMF. Microsoft really needs to copy Apple on this and use PDF instead. Talk about NIH.
I'm a writer, and I create PDFs on an almost daily basis. IMO, this is never going to fly for "real" publishing workflows. Here's why:
1. History--MS has a history of creating "open" formats (RTF) and then screwing around with them to prevent competitors from actually being able to code for them.
2. Cost--Real publishing workflows (writer-->editor-->print house) require the shop in that last step. 99% of big shops have invested big money in their PDF workflow... including things like PreFlight. They are not going to switch to some untested MS crap. You may be able to print these at Kinkos, but try getting a real printer to print a run of 1000 five-hundred page books and see what you get.
3. Support--Will Metro support Pantone colors? Will it handle CMYK color separations? What about the dozen or so other features that are requirements for accurate reproduction?
This was actually pretty easy to see coming (though personally I did not see it).
.Net. In that case they took a whole bunch of Java libraries and the VM, capitalized all the method names and came up with slightly improved VM technology. Instead of working to improve Java VM's they went thier own way and so now we have a huge duplication of effort across the industry as people waste time writing code for both platforms or porting already solid systems from one to the other, and back again.
This just continues farther down the path they already started with
So then why is it at all surprising to see Microsoft instead of embracing yet another industry standard go their own direction, industry duplication be dammned?
The future from this point is pretty easy to see with a great divide of people supporting PDF and people supporting Metro, and a lot of work for document makers and readers in-between.
The fundamental question: does Microsoft have enough momentum to really push Metro everywhere. I think it will be hard as PDF is far more entrenched in many places than Java is/was... then again PDF's in the life of the average consumer have only just started to take off, and they will come at it from that direction (just as they always have).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ridding the Adobe Reader bloat (honest answer) (Score:1)
by skyshock21 (764958) on Wednesday April 27, @08:43AM (#12357806)
I found this posted by a fellow slashdotter a while back. I can't remember who it was though:
Answer is at this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146814&cid=12
Frickin' sweet! I gotta try this out now...
Huh. Worked like a charm on Acrobat 5 as well. (Except plug_ins only contains EWH32.api and search.api; I suppose printing is built into this version, since it seems to work just fine.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I work in commercial printing -- heavily variable, fully digital stuff. Aside from our proprietary workflow (which kicks everyone's ass, by the way, but only runs on certain presses) everything we do is PDF-driven. This isn't (only) because Adobe has made tools that make this easy to do, but because every digital press on the market, whether it be Xeikon, Xerox, HP Indigo, NexPress, or whatever, supports PDF on their frontend RIP.
So, until Metro is supported by these manufacturers, we will continue to use PDF. In fact, the way capital expenditures work around here, we will continue using PDF for several years after Metro is supported.
It's still not built-in. You'd still have to download a reader or an update or whatever, and since XP/2000/98 don't use the graphics model Metro will be an encapsulation of, there's no speed to be gained there. There is, thus, no damned benefit over Acroread on those platforms, even if you make the viewer free and available and everything.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I worked in a math department relatively recently. Everyone there spoke TeX, and even though the department moved from Red Hat to OSX, they just installed TeXShop and kept on using it.
Because OSX prefers PDF so much, pretty much everything was then generated in that format. But folks would still get papers in PS format. Hell, people frequently post their theses as DVI files. (Which have the small problem of requiring a TeX distribution installed to view them, since they don't include fonts. Mad tiny, though.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The death of OS/2 is certainly no mystery to me.
I tried to like it at the time. My company bought a copy of Warp to test, with a view to moving all our development machines over. We couldn't get it to run on any of them.
On mine, the video drivers didn't work. On a second one, the hard disk drivers didn't work reliably. On a third, it wouldn't even boot.
So that was the end of Warp.
It was probably fine on all-IBM hardware, but that wasn't a realistic proposition.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Oh... http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/printing/ you mean anything can print to a PDF? Natively? With a built in accelerated viewer? IT'S BEEN OUT ALREADY HOW LONG!?! Uh... nevermind then.
The only possible advantage I can think of is the possibility that Microsoft will include a "print to Metro" printer driver with Windows. Adobe snookers scads of people into buying Acrobat Exchange or whatever instead of using free PDFCreator (which I'm told has issues, but I've never run into them); if Microsoft can capitalize on that, they can make the creation of Metro documents extremely popular, especially among people who aren't already savvy about generating PDFs.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
PDF killer, aka 'myPDF'
iTunes killer aka 'MSItunes'
Flash killer, aka 'WinFlash'
let's just say i'm not holding my breath...
when was the last time MS came out with a really great app? can you remember back that far?
Not to be confused with the METRO2 (and older Metro (1)) credit reporting formats used by the US consumer data industry (credit bureaus):
http://www.cdiaonline.org/data.cfm
ON DELETE CASCADE
Oh, maybe I didn`t explain myself very well, so I`ll give it another try. Hear this.
It has been announced, on the Adobe site, that Adobe is buying Macromedia.
adobe site
And then I read that Microsoft is byting into the Adobe market, trying to outdo one of their major products. OK, Adobe may be more then PDF, but makes one wonder. What timing, eh? Is Microsoft doing this on purpose, what are they thinking, and if they should succeed (using their known tactics), what effect could that have on Micromedia..ups Macromedia;) ?
Eh, maybe I`m reading too much into this, dunno.
I have to chime in on this. I've been using it for probably about a year now. It works great.
.tiff pictures (about 1.3M per letter size) which is too big. Using tiff2pdf and other tools I can get that down to about 50-120K per letter size page (using g4 compression).
About 2 years ago, I decided I had too much paper, and that I couldn't find any important papers amoung the bunch. Being a packrat, I decided scanning was the way to go.
I bought a used Fujitsu M3097g+ off ebay for about $100 with document feeder and got started.
I can generate
Using djview I can get it down to around 13-25K. Thats right, like 25-40% the size of a similar PDF (or less). Plus djvu has technology to cleanup fly-specs and noise on pictures to improve compression.
djvu does color, or black and white and conversion is pretty fast. Plus, djvu documents are just a concatenation of complete single files: you can open up, unpack and add, remove or rearrange all the pages in the file. So, I can continuously append pages a larger djvu file over months as I scan them. That is difficult to do with PDF.
And its open source. The free tools will remain free, and there are enough tools available for reading, creating and manipulating files.
we've seen this before, including your claim that the real professionals won't use it.
It is true for the next 2-3 years. In the meantime MSFT will pump millions in it, and leverage its monopoly to push the format/protocol/API whatever.
It will reach the mediocre level at some time, it will never surpass the original (PDF in this case) but it will become "good enough" for 95% of normal users including "normal professionals".
Because of the small remaining group of users for "the real thing", it will retreat into the professional and expensive market and become irrelevant to normal users.
We have seen this pattern before with various protocols, with the web browser, with opengl/directx. It might happen again if they pump enough effort into this and the authorities keep sleeping and let a convicted monopolist misuse its monopoly once more.
Oh well.
A combined FlashPaper/PDF format that leaps past current PDF capabilities is the way for Adobe to be sure that Microsoft doesn't take the PDF market from them.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I like your idea in terms of "chuckle" factor, but frankly, providing "sucky" products for Windows later than OSX/Linux products would be a really elaborate suicide plan for Adobe. Easier just to sell off the company and give money back to shareholders.
Hurrah sir! Why people insist on imposing the page-format domain on a tool that complete subverts it is beyond me. With proper coding, almost any PDF document can be coded as something that will render in a web browser on its own. Zooming in, page breaks, etc, are all total anachronisms.
If you were to say that you just like how easy it is to create scalable representations with PDF tools, I would have left this alone, but if you are telling me that you CANNOT create borwser-readable scalable graphics, I say check out SVG.
This is going to be fucking awesome. Microsoft does it again!
Sun understands Open Source just fine. OASIS _is_ an open document format. And, you _are_ an idiot.
"There are licensing problems with djvu..."
Read the mailing lists. There's a Russian who may have come up with a way around that particular issue. Plus the "IP" in question ONLY affects a small part of the code. The part that unfortunatelly keeps the encoding from being as efficient as possible.
Perhaps a high-profile internal migration to OpenOffice.org might help a bit...
Really wishful thinking: maybe Adobe could contribute some programmers to help in maintaining and improving OOo.
Hey, it's life-or-death for the company here. They'd better take a radical approach or else their days are over.
The language will be free to use for the individual but they do have to pay hundreds of thousands in courses to learn the 112 alphabet language. Also there will be a bi-yearly charge for each offspring who gets taught language.
Release date is expected sometime before the next millenium.
Microsoft chose "metro", because idiots feel cool saying it. "Hey, it's a metro document."
I repeat, only idiots like this name from Microsoft. Need I say it again? Okay, you are a stupid fucking drooling idiot if you like this name.
I smell a Fraunhofer...
Kinda like entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle-hardened Netware-based workflows to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary file servers.
Nah, that could never happen.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
"Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files. Good luck with that, guys."
You don't get it do you? Microsoft controls a monopoly OS and they aren't afraid of breaking the law by using its monopoly in that sector to extend its power into other sectors.
They'll just bundle it in their OS and if they're afraid that they'll be forced to remove it they'll integrate it into their OS and flip the US legal system the bird.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
PDF has spawned two important ISO Standards: PDF/X for the prepress industry, and PDF/A (currently in draft status) for document archiving.
If Microsoft has no intention of turning Metro over to an international standards organization such as ISO, then Metro will have limited usefulness. I suspect that large enterprises (which presumably have IT staff that recognize the value of standards) will continue to use PDF.
Didn't MS try to introduce a PDL once before (TrueImage)? Perhaps Metro will go the same way.
Microsoft's success in destop publishing history is a real mixed bag.
/.'s know they can get the excellent PDFcreator for winblows, but the average user simply pays for Acrobat when they discover Acrobat Reader is cripple-ware. PDF products have also driven much of Adobe's growth in the last few quarters.
-Office's file formats are the dominant document creation files. Adobe/Macromedia users can chill-out because you are typically represented as a more lucrative, but smaller market segment.
-Does anyone use Microsoft's wacky desktop publishing software included in some versions of Office?
-
- I see -no- incentive for a printer manufacturer to develop a driver for this new M$ format.
-The wise thing for M$ to do would be to abandon whatever printing system they've got now and replace it with Metro.
All of these factoids suggest to me that MS believes they have an opportunity, but it will fail.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
after reading a good 90% of the posts in this topic, it is apparent that 90% or more of /. has simply NO CLUE what happens in the desktop publishing world and how this will affect the printing industry
A couple people got it right though, the printing industry (not your pos laserjet or kinko's or even you companys fancy $5000 xerox color laser printer) will not give up the billions of dollars invested in creating the "perfect" PDF workflow. While the Formats used (PDF, Postscript, JDF, CiP3|4 and PPF) are all Free to use, the software used to create them isnt.
Not only that, to make the a printed product, you need to make lithographic plates, either from film or directly from PDF (CTP). the imagesetters are run by software from Creo (Prinergy or Brisque) or Rampage rips. HUGE money has gone into the purchasing of this equipment (one imagesetter and a single Prinergy server can set you back well over 100k a YEAR + support fee).
If microsoft wants into this HUGE industry, they need to offer more than just a new file format.
Adobe offers the most complete page creation suit that there is. While many many people use Quark to actually make the page layout placement, everyone used Illustrator to make the postscript files (export page from Quark, import into Illustrator, print to EPS in illustrator, becuase postscript in quark 4 and 5 is broken).
This is a waste of time because it'll get lost in teh sea of slashdot stories...
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
You know what else has outlived its sell-by date? That extra apostrophe in "its".
Mostly random stuff.
I uttlerly despise Adobe and PDF. I once had a document I was working on that was some 10 pages of text and graphs and such. Out of a bit of curiosity I saved it under OpenOffice as .scx (or whatever OO's normal extension is, dont remember), .doc, and .pdf The .doc was about 4 times the size of the .scx and the .pdf was about 40 times that. Then I saved every page as a .bmp and the total was less then the .pdf
They are extremely large and bloated, slow loading and just an ineffecient format. I avoid them whenever I can and if metro is smaller/faster then I could easily see it come to dominate.
BTW last version of Word I used didnt have a print to PDF unless you had some sort of addon. OpenOffice does though, never use it because I boycott Acrobat when I can.
Here's a short list of things which, if they do, Microsoft can near-eliminate PDF in short order.
Include the Metro Reader in XPsp3 and Longhorn, and as a free download in the Recommended Windows Updates for preXPsp3 and other Windows OSes.
Include the Metro Reader for Macintosh in with the next Mac Office disks, and make it available as a separate free download from Microsoft's Mactopia website.
Provide a version of the Metro Reader for Linux (gasp!), as a free download.
Make the Metro Reader also read PDFs, to ease the migration process. Plug ins for Netscape/Firefox/IE would add to this.
Make a Metro Writer that works better than Acrobat for document creation.
Of course, the "include with" might fall under "tying" and unleash various anti-trust watchdogs, so they might only be able to have it as a free download, with almost as great an effect.
The first two means almost everyone who would need to could get to read Metro. The Linux version might be needed for some of the big enterprise customers, who find the utter universal readability of PDF a major draw for using it; however, Microsoft will be reluctant to do this, as this will necessarily expose the workings more than they usually like, allowing (eventually) competitors for the MetroWriter. Still, the additional Enterprise level penetration will probably make this not only beneficial but necessary.
Making the Metro Reader also a PDF reader has the potential to let them make Acrobat Reader itself less necessary, eroding both Adobe and PDF market exposure that way.
The last part will be the hardest part. Acrobat is not a Bad product, and IMHO Microsoft is not as good as Adobe (and nowhere near Apple) for usabilty design. Nonetheless, the people they hire aren't stupid. "Worst" case, they'll make something mediocre, and merely take a large bite out of the PDF market share. "Best" case, they'll get everything except the OpenOffice users... who neither M$ or AD'ohbe are making money from anyway.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I thought I heard you say Microsoft, open, and royalty-free in the same breath.
Oracle/SAP/Baan/Peoplesoft/JDE are ERP systems, which Microsoft hasn't even come close to entering in a competitive manner.
Why? It's not about software when it comes to these monolithic systems, but processes and process mapping.
The attraction of a system like this is its integration points - your costing system interfaces directly with your shipping execution/order management/inventory/MRP/MPS/etc.
Microsoft simply does not have a product offering allowing that sort of integration, nor do I see them successfully creating one and competing against the big guys.
And it's not an easy market to enter, even for a Microsoft. In order to enter a market like this you need to:
The largest aspect of this market isn't the software package, but the brains involved with implementing it at a customer. It's a techno-functional role that requires either tight integration between the two business groups (functional SMEs and Tech SMEs) or a hybrid group that is capable of both functions.
Finally, ERP is somewhat of a "capped" market. The cost of switching from one ERP to another is enormous. The only companies that would really be in a market niche for Microsoft are companies that currently don't have an ERP offering from one of the big guys (SAP/Oracle).
This small niche has some opportunity for Microsoft Business Solutions (with a standard cost accounting/GL package with hooks into other systems as needed) but is not nor will ever be a direct competitor for Oracle or SAP except in these niche markets.
And if you look at the R&D Oracle is doing right now, they're moving so far ahead that MS will have a lot of difficulty playing catch up. We're talking about universal best practice business flows modelled by the ERP system, and defining these best practices within industry verticals for direct implementation into the product offerings Oracle offers. These steps aren't done in an R&D ivory tower; they're done by collecting data from a multitude of implementations (both by Oracle consultants and the Big Four consulting firms) and gap analyses performed on the current products.
Nobody's going to invest $450 million in an ERP system from a vendor who has no significant case history of successful implementations.
The knowledge base simply isn't there, and Microsoft doesn't have a track record in scalable ERP solutions to give them the edge to compete in this marketplace.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Keep in mind, that they can't control content ala-DRM when a file format is in use that they don't dictate.
DRM is Microsoft's new "Trustworth Computing" stance. Taking over PDF is a strategic move, not a tactial one.
It's just one element of their ultimate goal - controlling access to content.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
um, what are slides?
...
Sorry, but I don't grok 20th century ideas.
Derez Metro
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yes, it's possible to generate truly massive PDF. This is usually due to the stupidity of the application generating the PDF, however. PDF gives you a million ways to shoot yourself in the foot. But I'd blame the tools, not the format.
BTW last version of Word I used didnt have a print to PDF unless you had some sort of addon.
I'm talking about Acrobat. If you install Acrobat, every application becomes capable of printing to PDF.
OpenOffice does though, never use it because I boycott Acrobat when I can.
Boycotting the format isn't really the same as boycotting Acrobat...
Bundling with Windows can certiainly be an advantage, but it doesn't ensure success. I don't recall the proprietary MSN, which was advertised with a shortcut on every fresh Win95 desktop, being very successful at killing AOL and Compuserve. Ultimately, the product has to not completely suck like MSN did. The internet ended up making all those propprietary networks die or force them to re-invent themselves as web portals and ISPs.
.net based software for any length of time you'll know that the many-megabyte .NET framework didn't magically appear on those old machines by itself.
Also, you cannot bundle something like Metro into an existing installed user base very easily, so adoption will take a year or more. Not everyone will jump to download another giant service pack for XP or will beat down the door for Longhorn on release day. If you've been deploying
I think it'll be like Windows Media formats, even if it is "free". Despite every copy of Windows supporting WMF files, MP3, MPEG, Quicktime and so on did not go away. Knocking PDF off its pedestal won't happen--at least not for many many years. Metro NEVER will be successful unless it is supported on Macs, UNIX/Linux, professional printing equipment, etc...AND it works as well as PDF. PDF and postscript are just too established.
because you just described one.
There are important technical difference's between PDF's cos object system and xml's object system.
Here are some things which are simple with cos, difficult with xml:
1. Count the number of children of the root node.
2. Immediately jump to page n. With XML, you potentially would have to parse the whole document.
3. Represent an object with multiple parents, i.e., a loop in the object tree.
4. Delete or modify objects in the tree by only appending to the file on disk.
If metro is XML-based, then Microsoft has to spend a lot of effort and energy working around these limitiations.
Also, the PDF format is extremely well documented and open.
In which case, what's this crap about reverse engineering?
I CAN'T see the language that something uses? (Why is it full of BAD WORDS?)
What's M$ trying to pull?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The real reason is that Microsoft likes to have their own proprietary formats so they can manipulate or make profits from others using it.
Then why can't Microsoft just "embrace and extend" PDF using the official PDF extension mechanism?
The worlds largest free newspaper is called Metro (15 million readers daily) and it will be so funne when the M$ marketing machine will try to handle the legal stuff when they arrive from the poor country cousin side of the atlantic and as always try get a grip on culture...
Welcome to Europe M$. You will loose again!
They might even add a fancy touch-screen color display, which would be SO much better than "Ld Ltr MP".
Why do printer makers use abbreviations instead of flashing individual words like a Coke machine does (ICE then COLD then COCA then COLA then 1.00)? I could see TRAY 1 then NEEDS then LETTER then PAPER. If that doesn't work, then why not scroll the message like a Pepsi machine does (ICE then CE C then E CO then COL then COLD then OLD then LD P, etc)?
As for the "it cannot be sublicensed" --- boo hoo. I already acknowledged this - if someone wants their own copy, they can also register.
This step is still incompatible with any copyright license meeting the Debian Free Software Guidelines or the related OSI Open Source Definition.
It was a sarcasm for heaven sake. If you had bothered to read my previous posts you would have seen that I think very highly of Sun microsystems.
With the exception of beta, when was windows ever free?
If the price of a new PC with preinstalled Windows XP Home Edition is no greater than the price of a new PC with just a KNOPPIX CD, then Windows XP Home Edition is free as in Bud in the eyes of less sophisticated home users.
The Metro was small and ugly but the square (called Quartic) steering wheel was in the Allegro. It was also rumoured to have a better drag coefficient in reverse.
Magic numbers are also in-band signalling.
Magic numbers inside the file also require a fopen() + fread() + fclose() call on the file itself, which is potentially more expensive on some file systems than just a readdir() that picks up the file name suffix.
And are you suggesting some kind of out-of-band signalling instead? Like, say, the file inode stores its MIME type? Sounds cool at first, but again, it can get out of sync with what's actually in the file.
Mac OS has used out-of-band signaling since 1984. Each inode stores a pair of four-character codes: one "file type" code, which could be mapped to Internet Media Types, and one "creator" code, which determines what application to start when the user wants to Open the file.
My guess:
.
(1) Obeying the licensing terms for "Metro" will intrinsically violate GPL and LGPL,
(2) GPL/LGPL/other reasonable open source licensed software will be legally *unable* to make Metro documents, because it will be patented.
(3) Microsoft undercuts Adobe fees for printer manufacturers. Printer manufacturers (on small hardware margins) gleefully sign up with Microsoft. Not suprisingly the agreements will prevent them from making Linux drivers, but this will be kept secret.
(4) Linux becomes unable to print on most common printers. This becomes common meme in business, just as the common meme 10 years ago was "Macs can't live on a network with Windows machines".
Think about Microsoft's push with secretive BIOSes
What's the goal there? To prevent Linux from working on ordinary cheap PC hardware. That was how Windows was succesful---barnacled to Moore's law and a deep hardware market.
This is the same goal. They can't kill Linux by software pricing---but they will try to kill it by hardware pricing and availability.
That is their strategic goal. The idea has to be that the easy hardware that everybody gets on-line or at Fry's or COMPusa will be Linux incompatible---that "everything works" with Windows, and is very difficult with Linux.
I think the idea behind it is that Grandma Jane might want to rename the 4df-NIKONZZx.jpg file she managed to get off her camera to something like "Our Trip to Colorado" but wouldn't necessarily realize that she needed to only change the part before the .jpg.
In Microsoft Windows, when you give the Rename command (right-click a file icon and choose "Rename", or a slower-than-normal double-click on the name), it opens a text box and selects the whole file name so that typing a new name will replace the whole name. The correct solution would be to select everything up to but not including the last '.' character in the name, such that typing a new name will just insert the new name before the suffix.
The problem to many people is that the output of ps2pdf isn't nearly as nice-looking as the output of Adobe Acrobat Distiller or possibly the output of whatever metrosexual component Microsoft is slashvertising in this article.
Ahhhh, but 95% of the adobe documents that you download are not setup to be typed on directly, and you must print the darn thing to write by hand. SO, at that point you should have just used HTML to build your page.
Problem with supplying printed forms as HTML rather than a Paper-Destined Format is that no popular web browser supports the CSS extensions for paged media, and thus there's no reliable way to tell the browser where to insert a page break.
My biggest pet peeve is when I download a job application in PDF format, and it says I must TYPE on the application. The problem is, the person who made the damn file didn't set it up so I could type on it!
Here, the employer just wants you to prove that you are familiar with the operation of either a typewriter or a copy of Acrobat full version.
Well, they certainly have been very permissive with respect to allowing anyone to implement C#/CLR without paying royalties
True, but System.Windows.Forms was not subject to such an explicit grant. Which graphical .NET application links to nothing but the parts submitted to ECMA? Or which non-graphical application will become accepted by novice users?
As long as the PostScript file is generated correctly (there are some tricks with LaTeX, for example, to ensure the fonts are set up correctly), I've found the output to be excellent.
Problem is that a lot of applications' PostScript output apparently isn't optimized for rasterization at 72 dpi. It's said that Distiller can make sense of the BS PostScript code that some applications emit and make it look good even on screen.
DJVU is more optimized in image compression, but lacks all of the other features of PDF that someone in the print industry could never live without.
Plus, any of those image compression algorithms could be easily added to the next PDF spec, and then PDF would again be completely the best.
So, I have no idea why you're knocking PDF so much...
The Linux package DJVUlibre allows both viewing and DJVU document creation and is Open Source. [...] LizardTech (ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION) provides the free downloadable Mac/Win viewers, and sells Win/Mac DJVU creation tools. (either above URL)
Problem is that a lot of existing machines running Microsoft Windows cannot be made to run GNU/Linux without substantial additional purchases because of lack of hardware drivers, insufficient disk space for installing an additional operating system, etc. For people who have already purchased machines running Microsoft Windows, neither DjVuLibre for Linux (price of new hard drive and other peripherals) nor DjVu Document Express for Windows ($400) is affordable.
You are SO ready for a Macintosh.
I'm typing this on a PC made in 2000 that I received as a Christmas gift. I'd get a job and buy a Mac for myself, but CareerBuilder.com hasn't been too helpful, as all the employers whose job postings I have responded to have turned me down in favor of another candidate.
I think you are confusing Adobe PDF Reader with the PDF format.
Which other easily installed (i.e. no Cygwin) PDF viewer for the Microsoft Windows platform do you recommend that people install instead of Adobe Reader?
but if you are telling me that you CANNOT create borwser-readable scalable graphics, I say check out SVG.
Which major web browser comes with an SVG viewer?
I'm talking about Acrobat. If you install Acrobat, every application becomes capable of printing to PDF.
Can most home users who bought a computer with Microsoft Works Suite (including Microsoft Word) pre-installed justify the price of an Acrobat license?
It doesn't even feel very bloated or sluggish to me, and I'm using it on a 2 years old laptop. So what's supposed to be wrong with it?
Not everybody can afford to replace a computer every 2.5 years. For example, I'm typing this on a computer that's over 4 years old, and though Adobe Reader 7 feels faster than Adobe Reader 6 (to Adobe's credit), it still takes rawther long to load and still freezes the web browser until it's done loading.
So I am curious -- how is the performance for a few hundred page document being viewed in a web browser? Do you have to download the entire file to view page 126?
So it'll be well dressed and suspiciously gay looking?
PDF is GOOD, because I can create a document and the fonts can be embedded within the document. Sure Metro may be able to do this, but PDF and PS have been around for years, they are the industry standard! It is very much what you see is what you get, a good way to look at a document before it is printed.
Why would you hate PDF? Probably because you have not viewed a PDF from a machine running OSX. Try it you might like it? It is like google for your document.
Portable Document Format, anyone can create, anyone can write. You can edit the documents quite simply using a variety of programs other than acrobat reader. (To Name a Few, OmniGraffle (OSX only) , Adobe Illustrator, just to name a couple.
It is true that if you've got real big files and no broadband, you'll have a problem using them, but most people who don't have broadband know people who do.
Tech Public Policy stuff
What about XSL-FO?
FYI, the only thing covered by ECMA is the CLR, C# syntax, etc. The libraries are not covered.
Which is entirely the point. The libraries are not subject to Microsoft's permissive patent license.
if the interfaces are made public (which the .NET ones are), there's basically jack anyone can do if you turn around write your own implementation, so long as you don't use any of their code.
Reimplementing everything from the public spec will guard against accusations of copyright infringement but not against accusations of patent infringement. Who's to say that Microsoft isn't planning to use a patent against Mono the way it used a patent against VirtualDub?
If the company doesn't do what you like - either don't use their product, or use it - your choice.
Is it my choice if a government or the only bank with branches in town chooses to require all of its citizens/customers to use a particular proprietary product?
But again, seems like the [Mac's four-character] file type could get out of sync with what's actually in the file.
A Mac program that materially changes the format of a file is expected to use a file system call to change the file's HFS file type. Can you give examples of how it would fail?
As for the 'metro' document format, it needs "Avalon" Subsystem and Print Drivers to print. Even if MS provides a complete specification, rather than the "wrapped binary sh*t" of WordML, you're gonna be locked into Longhorn for printing those documents.
My RCA VCR from 1996 uses what I called the Coke system, alternating "MARK" and "COMM" on the display while marking what it thinks are commercials. Surely someone else can find pre-1985 prior art. And if a scrolling character display (what I called the Pepsi system) is patented, the patent has long since expired, as it has been in use on pinball machines since at least the 1980s.
So an entire industry that functions on two basic file types--PDF and TIFF, is going to ditch workflows that start at $40K, and insist that manufacturers rejigger their direct digital proofers ($150k a pop and up) so that microsoft can play in the sandbox. Lets not mention that the vendors with the greatest growth in prepress workflows (Dalim) and prepress asset manangement (Britech) release in Linux and Linux and OSX.
Yep.
I'm assuming this is less about trying to compete in prepress and publishing, and more about trying to win the race for middleware in the creation and processing of electronic forms? It better be that, or else I'm not really sure what the point would be. Oh wait--thats it--its pointless.
I could see Microsoft doing things like making .met a default document editing tool, or Outlook mail format, and then if someone tries to save as another format it does the Excel-like action of popping up a Window that warns "You may lose precious formatting options or other features if you don't save in .metro format, are you sure you want to do this?"
.metro format, causing the number of Metro users to baloon quickly.
Many people will get nervous and decided to save in
The licensing could be incorporated into OEM installs of Windows also, to help Microsoft boost the number "licensed users" of Metro, to further encourage people to get on what could start as a non-existent band-wagon, but turn into a real one.
I can't afford a sig!
PDF is a format for an exact reproduction of the appearance of documents. There is no equivalent open format.
I think you got postscript and pdf confused.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
"HEY, BALLMER, WHY DON'T YOU SUCK MY TINY YELLOW BALLS?"
I'll simply note that per Joel Spolsky, it is easier to write code than to read code.
Thus we are doomed in software to revist anew the lessons others have painfully addressed and at length.
Excellent tastefully understated sarcasm. (-:
IMESHO PS (and so PDF) are both too powerful for this task. Or to put it another way, since there are a zillion different ways to represent text in PS, there are also a zillion different ways to push the limits on (and break) the various PS interpreters, and a zillion different ways to make content recovery difficult and imperfect. Perhaps we could use a limited subset of PS as a standard, and gzip it? But who would regulate such a standard?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...since it would work with all existing PS systems.
OpenDocument is still, IMESHO, ideal for documents where exact layout is not critical. E.g. you can whomp up a wordprocessed document in A4 land and still print it out in US-Letter land without having to pull funny tricks with the printer queues.
The last thing we want is for the fixed-layout formats to become swamped in pointless wannabee-SVG bells and whistles (mutant PDF/Flash spawn) or 0\/\/n3rz3d by a hostile/selfish interest (Metro).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Surprisingly enough, yes it is your choice. You can vote.
Not if the measure granting a monopoly has bipartisan support. I voted straight Libertarian in the 2004 election, but zero of the Libertarian candidates for whom I voted got elected.
If you do not think that is enough - run for office
I'm not old enough to run for federal or state elected office.
lobby someone, picket.
In fact, I do plan to participate in many of the local Libertarian Party's events, but if it's not local government, how can the average citizen do that?
Luckily for most of us there is usually more then a choice of one bank.
Tell that to anybody who lived in Terre Haute, Indiana, for 1999-2003 while going to Indiana State University or Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. The only bank in town during those years was First Financial, and for much of that time, the bank's web site was IE-only. Would you choose a college based on what banks are nearby?
I should say I still see those cars here in Israel on the roads. Well, not the sports version. :)
More than that, it is used here to go on highways as well as inside the city.
Actually, there's not much of them left on the roads and they don't seem to fit into picture, but still I see some on my way to work.
From what I've seen the Avalon stuff is only slightly incompatible with the SVG spec, so much so I think it would be relatively easy to write a converter from one to another. Last I checked, the quoting, attributes and properties were arranged differently, but still a 1:1 mapping.
If this Metro is based off Avalon and such, then why not just switch everyone over to SVG? SGV 1.1 spec is formalized and is quite awesome. I do some interactive interfaces in SVG (as opposed to flash or Java) for the web.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.