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."

Comments

XML will have performance issues

[victim]

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.

Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN

[aixou]

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.

Already have XML based document format

[wombatmobile]

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.

DJVU is probably better & Open Source tools ex

[alizard]

If you want a REALLY superior document format that makes PDF look like something out of the Old Stone Age, check out DJVU. It's a seriously cool format that practically nobody knows about.

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.

Re:Too late?

[EddWo]

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.