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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."
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.
http://www.acropdf.com/
Look for PDF Speed Up. Removes the nags, sets all the plugins to optional, turns off the splash screen, kills the ads in the corner, ect.
Acrobat Reader 6.x opens very quick now, and I have yet to have it crash. (By quick I mean in under 3 seconds on my 900mhz, 512mb pc100 sdram win2k machine)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
But consider...is this notan important step to wiping out *.doc as the "standard" document format? Granted, you're replacing it with Yet Another Microsoft File Format, but surely this one sounds like it will be far less onerous to work with.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
"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.
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?
An XML-based PDF-alternative is a good idea.
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.
but your forgetting,
if microsoft makes a metro document editor included in ms word, which almost all businesses have, then most businesses will have no need to ever use adobe again. All they need is for metro to be almost as good and then creatively get it on every computer out there. Then everyone will be able to read and edit the document. After Adobe is dead, they can start to charge for a "full featured" document editor and leave simple edits and reading to word(or as a stand alone program). Either way, they can use this to kill adobe pretty damn easily.
It helps when your stuff comes pre-installed. YOu just need to bundle it right to kill off competition.
of course, this is all banking on their ability to come out with a format that is at least almost as good at pdf. But if they do, it will still take a few years to begin unseating Adobe because businesses are slow to change even with incentives.
It's not at all obvious, but you can have a URL link to a specific page of a PDF in Acrobat Reader. Tack something like #page=42 onto the end of a URL to a PDF and Reader will open it to that page. (Of course, for what you describe you'll still have to update the URL when you finish, but it's better than nothing.)
More info here.
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.
Surely that's the same strategy Adobe uses. Adobe Acrobat Professional, for example? Just guessing here...
Sure, but PDF is an open format that they allow anyone to implement independently without requiring them to pay Adobe royalties. I doubt Microsot would be so permissive.
Actually an Intuit employee told me that QuickBooks is their most profitable product. It only came about because they found that Quicken was being used by lots of small businesses, who needed something better.
I think TurboTax has been going down in sales due to HRB's TaxCut and services. They dropped the European version, if I recall correctly.
Intuit has been trying to expand, if their long list of non-memorable products is any sign. They just seem to be running out of room for growth, and not sure where to turn.
Of course, this is an outsider looking in, so I know nothing.
I'm not saying that's not possible, it sound pretty likely even. However, I think that there is a good chance that it would violate some Anti-Trust laws somewhere.
I'd wager a large sum of money that someone was pull a lawsuit at some point. Probably about the same time market share and/or revenue for Adobe from Acrobat type products nose-dives.
Adobe still have some pretty useful products outside of Acrobat. They're not exactly a one-trick pony. (C/f Netscape).
Even IBM survived the non-success of OS/2 against Windows. They have all types of hardware, pretty hand operating systems (AIX, OS/400, etc) and a stack of application and management software for all types of platforms.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
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
> 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.
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. Couple this with the 80/20 rule (about 80 percent of pdf creators use 20 percent of the feature set) then a free beer Metro export bundled with MS Office will seem very attractive to them.
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.
Well preview still has some issues. Don't rely on using Acrobat to edit a document/fill out a form and then send it as a PDF to a OS-X user as the last time i did this none of the cooments were visable. Turned out preview was having some issues in displaying these comments.
Lead to a great converstation and a week of lost time.
it's OpenDocument since it was finished. actually microsoft at first participated in oasis workgroup but withdrew. wonder why :)
Rich
Could this also be because OSX work so well together and with Tiger coming out, burst the bubble a bit. If people start using this as opposed to PDFs one of the (many) cool features of OSX will be obsolete.
Or that was my first thought when I saw the headline anyway.
PDF will still occupy the high end. Most $1,000+ printers understand postscript and PDF natively, and even if these presses/printers are firmware upgradable, who wants another page description language? Especially if most of your graphics/pre-press people use Macs anyway and can't use Metro. Sorry, just because it's XML and doesn't have %% signs everywhere doesn't make it a worthwhile page description language.
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.
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.
Twice tried to buy Intuit, and both times the company jumped at the chance. The first time MS simply used the merger talks to extract strategic information and to slow the company down, thereby giving them enough time to get Money out. They then shut down the merger talks when they had everything they needed.
The second time, when Money was a disaster, they tried again. This time they were blocked by the government.
Though the problem with blah.jpg.bat is a result of moving from 8.3 filenames to 'long' filenames. If they'ld had, say, 50.3 filenames from way back, this problem might not have happened. Not that they had the space to waste on it.
No, you look forward to a replacement for Adobe's PDF Reader
I totally agree. But this announcement could well fix this. If Adobe feels threatened by Metro and then realises it's really just down to resistance to the bloatware, it could well spur them to make a much leaner, faster PDF reader. Call it "Preview for Windows"... well, perhaps.
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.
You mentioned $1,000 plus printers but the ones that won't switch are the $100,000 pls printers. You don't switch document formats to an untested one in a press that costs that much.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
PDF is mostly used by academics. Scientists use it almost exclusively. Normal people usually use .doc or something equally (note: my opinion as a linux user!) ridiculous.
Even bundling it with windows won't affect the academic community because
1) Academics want to share knowledge to absolutely everyone
and
2) All computers can read PDFs, but not all computers use Windows.
Given this, I think that this Metro won't make too much of a splash unless it has support for a very wide range of systems. This is assuming that there are two equally featureful formats, however that's false because of latex etc. exporting to pdf.
Great. Now edit a PDF. What tools do you use? Open source tools?
Really, the problem you describe is all about Acrobat Reader and little to do with PDF. There is really nothing preventing the creation of a lightweight PDF viewer. They exist, in fact, and are beginning not to suck. Hopefully one will be ported to win32 soon.
... once you disable about eight million plug-ins that few people need. This is as simple as moving them out of the plug-ins directory (even on win32).
In fact, Acrobat Reader remains very lightweight even today
I also find disabling the Acrobat Reader browser plug-in useful, since reading PDFs is much nicer when Acrobat is not running in a browser window. Again, just move the plug-in out of the browser's plug-ins folder (at least on most platforms/browsers).
Acrobat Reader is still crucially important for accurate PDF viewing - document proofing, prepress, etc. I do agree that for most things, with all its default functionality, it's kinda overkill.
Another thing to understand is that "Metro" will go _nowhere_ if it lacks the proofing and prepress tools that exist for PDF. Things like EnFocus PitStop, and of course Adobe Acrobat Professional, are crucial tools for preflight and prepress. Without close equivalents to them, a format will go nowhere in press & print.
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
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...
What is with Microsoft and their Not Invented Here attitude ?
Seriously? Because then they don't own it. And they'd rather own than lease; so that they can, in turn, lease the product or technology back to the consumer. What technology is better is really of tertiary consideration. Since they have their monopoly, they'll install Metro tools on every shipping system, making it the defacto standard for LH users. Office users on the LH OS will find that they can seamlessly print and edit Metro docs, whereas they have to buy PDF tools/converters/importers from someone else.
Once LH achieves more penetration, the Metro format will be the standard, and then there is one less reason to give Adobe money instead of Microsoft. You'll be submitting your resume in Metro format in 10 years.
The only mystery is why Adobe continues to support the Windows platform. They should counter attack, by making their products rock on alternative platforms like OS X and Linux, and be late and sucky on Windows. Instead, however, it seems like they are "focusing their efforts" by striving for quality on Windows and neglecting the Windows competitors. It's a "compete with quality" strategy that would work in a normal universe, but this is a universe that Microsoft owns: which means quality is trumped.
Adobe would do better in the long run to attempt to break the Microsoft monopoly, and encourage a cosmology of OSes--then you would really depend on the cross-platform tools that Adobe can deliver. That's a long term strategy, however, and requires more vision than I think your typical MBA can muster.
--
$tar -xvf
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The major foundries provide fonts in both formats, and more importantly, in OpenType, which takes either TrueType or Type-1 outlines.
Straight Type-1 won't suffice anymore, even if you use Type-1 outlines, you'll want to use OpenType as the container format for proper Unicode support.
Even though windows now also supports Type-1 fonts natively, the major foundries still provide TrueType fonts - mainly because they kick Type-1's ass for use on displays, due to the 'hinting' used in TrueType (as an added bonus, though typefaces aren't copyrightable in the US, hint-instructions, being software code, are).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty