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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."
No, no it's not. PDF is fine. PDF is ubiquitous. Adding buzzword-friendly "XML" to it doesn't automatically make it better. It just makes it XML.
The PDF format is cumbersome to parse and cumbersome to manipulate; that's why there are few PDF viewers and even fewer PDF editors.
I fully agree that XML doesn't "automatically" make things better, and XML is often misapplied. But for this particular problem, it happens to be a solution to a real problem that the current format (PDF) has.
Another problem with PDF is that Adobe controls the PDF spec and periodically makes random changes to it that are only to their benefit. And Adobe's own products don't even comply with their spec.
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.
Or totally get rid of that attrocity and install this instead: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
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!
According to the Winhec keynote, Metro will be an integral part of Longhorn. Apparently, everything printable in Longhorn is a Metro document, or can be made one with ease... hey! Kind of like how everything printable in OS X is a PDF.
What a coincidence?
Check out the Winhec keynote for even more coincidences. Start about 1 hour and 3 minutes in to get to the Longhorn stuff.
Which is why I'm still running Acrobat Reader 5.0 - might not have the newest "features," but despite a warning when opening some documents that my reader doesn't support all the new features, everything seems to work with it. I haven't seen a problem yet, anyway.
Plus, it loads 5 times faster than the newest version, has fewer annoying ads, and.. well, I don't know what else, as I refuse to "upgrade" to find out.
Ah, good ol' troglodytic living!
Umm EVERY program that prints can create a PDF on the Mac. It's an option in the print dialog, SAVE AS PDF. Its a big button right on the button of the print dialog box. Yes I know it won't make a PDF form. So its massivly easy to make PDF's on the Mac.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
If you don't like acrobat, there are some alternatives for Windows that might be worth a try, not to mention stuff like GhostScript, xpdf, etc.
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.
My understanding is that products based around Metro will be available for licensing, not the format itself. Heck, based on the articles, it seems that it's Global Graphics developing the licensed products, rather than Microsoft itself.
Being developed under one company does have the downside of having them control the format. Butchering the format with time or making it intentionally arcane for their own benefit would defeat the purpose of such a format, though, and shouldn't become an issue if the format is properly defined and versioned to begin with.
Meanwhile, WiX has yet to be undermined in such a manner.
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.
Right, and we are disappointed most of the time - and so create open formats - OASIS, OGG, etc.
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
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
Hell, if this new format will get rid of the incompatibilities of Microsoft Works and Microsoft Office 95/97/2000/XP I am behind it. If the operating system can natively convert any MS Works or Office document to the new Metro format via wizard or context menu I will actually purchase a copy of Longhorn. I am sick and tired of trying to give a poor explaination as to why a document; rtf, doc, wps, etc, will not open with the copy of the MS app they happen to be using because it was saved with the app on their previous system. I think MS actually designs in incompatiability.
You're ALSO forgetting.
You have remember what PDF is and whats being used to create it.
PDF is an extension of postscript, where is allows to go from creation to distribution in a WYSIWYG format. Most people who need strict WYSIWYG in their documents won't be using any of MS offerings (including publisher) in the first place in creating said documents as it's piss poor at retaining it's layout and formatting.
So maybe your typical office drone who thinks every slideshow is a PowerPoint presentation will use the new METRO format, but users like designers, companies' PR depertments, engineers etc who need their documents to go everywhere in the manner in which they intend will be making their documents in with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and/or Pagemaker and exporting to PDF.
So unless Microsoft manages to develop software that can kill off each and every of Adobe's offerings that deal with 2D documents, PDF isn't going to die.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
... support the full features of PDF, such as ICC colour management, PDF 1.4 transparency, etc etc etc .
Preview is nice and all, but far from a perfect PDF viewer. It cuts a lot of corners.
I got tired of Acrobat Reader and downloaded the free Foxit PDF reader instead. Tiny download, vastly better performance. Check it out.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
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
Well you know the OSX display system is based on PDF right? So Preview itself is not rendering the PDF, it is just reading the data from the file and passing it to Quartz the systems display framework.
Windows display system is currently based on GDI, so any pdf renderer on windows must read the pdf, and then calculate how to draw the equivelent image using GDI commands, a much slower process. You couldn't port Preview to Windows without also porting Quartz, and then it wouldn't really be Windows anymore.
Windows can render WMF and EMF files really fast because those formats are basically a set of GDI operations streamed to a file.
This Metro format will have the same benifits on Windows as PDF does on OSX, Metro is based on Avalon and XAML, which will be built into Windows as the presentation model.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
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...
According to the Winhec keynote, Metro will be an integral part of Longhorn. Apparently, everything printable in Longhorn is a Metro document, or can be made one with ease... hey! Kind of like how everything printable in OS X is a PDF.
.GEM metafile.
Or like everything printable on my nearly 20-year-old old Atari ST can be a vector
Metafiles are hardly a new idea (.WMF, Windows MetaFile, anyone?) and Longhorn's rendering subsystem obviously needed some modern way of dumping the data to disk...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
"comes packed with photo album software and the Yahoo toolbar" Only if you're dumb enough not to deselect these options when you download it.
Beating up people in little rooms, if you do it for a good reason you do it for a bad one.
Ghostscript doesn't support transparency in pdf's. Compare this document when viewed with Ghostscript/xpdf and when viewed Acrobat 5 or higher (or Mac OS X Preview).
Donate free food here
Which is why I'm still running Acrobat Reader 5.0 - might not have the newest "features," but despite a warning when opening some documents that my reader doesn't support all the new features, everything seems to work with it. I haven't seen a problem yet, anyway.
This year's blank tax forms PDFs generated these messages on version 5.0.9, though I couldn't see anything missing. (Why wouldn't the govt pick a lower common denominator when it came to collecting money? *Shrug*)
PDF has DRM, you know. You can restrict user saving, printing, copying, editing, and even high-level rendering.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I guess the target will be the low-end printers, those GDI-based ones that only work with proprietary undocumented drivers, and leave people with useless hardware when they upgrade Windows, let alone use another platform. If that's the case, all well and good. An open PDL will make these much more flexible.
Microsoft tried to butt in on Adobe's turf before with Truetype
Actually, that was started by Apple (it was called "Royal" originally). Adobe were being greedy about licensing ATM technology, so Apple and later MS decided to roll their own scaleable fonts. These days the coming font format is OpenType, which is an extension of Truetype which can use either Type 1 or Truetype glyphs. Only Adobe is really pushing that at the moment.
It's WinHEC, Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, they are making lots of announcements regarding 64bit Windows, Longhorn etc and the press is reporting on them. WinHEC happens every year and the date for WinHEC was set long before Tiger's release date was annouced.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
In vi the CRLF is easy to fix: :%s/^M//g
Hardly a difficult command to remember once you typed it a few times IMO.
Honestly it's never been that big of a deal to me.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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
On the other hand OpenOffice 2.0 will (the beta already does) support making any file (ppt, doc, etc) into a multipage pdf or a swf file (slides advance with each click.
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.
This doesn't seem like flamebait to me, and I don't think parent is wrong.
Royalties are generally ongoing payment made each time something is used. For example, the musician getting their (theoretical) cut of each album sold, or royalties on the usage of a song in a film.
Royalty-Free generally means that you don't have to pay for each copy shipped.. i.e. a printer manufacturer doesn't have to pay microsoft each time.
If you buy a royalty-free sound from sounddogs or wherever, you have to pay for the sound... but then you are free to use it in your mix as long as you dont distribute it on its own, without paying them more.
Nothing about Royalty-Free indicates that there wont be a high cost of entry - a licensing cost. Microsoft will probably waive that cost to most of the key players, but i doubt they would for FOSS.
It's just another attempt by microsoft to take over/replace an open format. Hopefully it's as weak as it looks.
Microsoft tried to butt in on Adobe's turf before with Truetype, but no one (or at least, no one important) does Truetype font libraries, Bitstream, Monotye et al all make their fonts type 1 postscript.
From Monotype:
"since more and more folks are looking for TrueType fonts, every new typeface we release is available in both formats"
From Bitstream:
"Bitstream sells fonts for Windows in TrueType, OpenType, or PostScript Type 1 format"
Looks like TrueType is doing just fine. You might want to brush up on your recent history.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I think I would have a problem buying a PC that doesn't have Windows already installed. It's an integral part of the computer from the first-time computer buyer's point of view. Yet after he's been trained to run in the Windows wheel and he wants new applications... or it comes time to upgrade... (cash register sounds). MS made the market standards by training it to use its product - by giving it out for "free".
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Hint: PDF files are meant to be printed. Printers typically use pages.
If they'd just fucking use HTML I'd get so much more done.
You are complaining that the document is being distributed in the wrong format. How is that the fault of PDF?
We already have the replacement, it's called HTML and it does just fine.
No. Because unfortunately, people still need to print things on paper for various reasons. HTML gives you practically zero control over page formatting (CSS gets you about 1% of the way there). PDF, on the other hand, is designed for page formatting.
You are complaining that when you use a hammer as a screwdriver, things don't work too well. No shit.
I agree that too many people distribute information in PDF format when they could have just used HTML. But many publishers are very print-centric. Remember that.
Anyone notice the latest version of Adobe Reader installs a shell handler in WinXP to enable thumbnails, just as WinXp natively handles jpg's and avi's?
I don't think they've been caught napping on this one, I expect them to put up a pretty good fight on this front.
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
Now, if you're a drug pusher, do you want your clients figuring out that the chemicals are a Bad Thing?
I'm gonna let you in on a little underworld insight. It goes quite against the grain of the common media-hyped misconception of the evil villianesque dealer waiting across the street from a gradeschool luring little children with his/her wares.
Dealers don't care about "hooking" new customers. Higher on the food chain, they only deal with smaller dealers, and are soley concerned with unloading in as risk-free a method as possible.
Dealers who deal directly to the end-user are either too pre-occupied with funding their own habit or getting busted to worry about trying to "drum up business." Business is ALWAYS booming, and the users are always seeking the dealer, not the other-way 'round. Dealers acknowledge that the user has made their own choice involving what may be a dangerous activity. Trying to actively addict others would be an invitation to arrest because it would involve a drug dealer's worst enemy: unknown individuals.
Nah, PDF is a presentation-only format. Typically you would prepare the text and layout in an application and then "print to PDF" or similar.