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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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... "
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.
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