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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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.
Exactly. My one and only problem with Microsoft is that they suck at everything they do. Other than that, it is a pretty cool company.
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.
Reminds me of a quote:
"The one time Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, it'll probably be a vaccuum cleaner"
..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 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.
As an end user, I look forward to any replacement to PDFs.
No, you look forward to a replacement for Adobe's PDF Reader. PDF the format is wonderful -- just look at it's support on Mac OS X.
The reason government agencies (and many many others) use it is because it's the best, most open, best-supported format of it's kind. There is absolutely no requirement that you use Adobe's software to read or write PDF.
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.
try not using the fucking bloated reader you moron. BTW.. some people like having documents in a none editable, "what you see on one platform is what you see on all platforms" document.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
You know, sucky products I could deal with. It's their business practices I can't stand.
If they weren't so underhanded and evil we wouldn't have to deal with their sucky products, because market forces would have either killed them or forced them to not suck.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
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.
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.
The splash screen to Win2K is a bitmap obviously blown up by 200% or so.
Slow down, turbo.
The splash screen is displayed before the video driver is loaded, hense the lack of color depth and resolution.
If you're gunna flame, check your facts first.
A speech...
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!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
Maybe their impossibility to play well with other formats is thier reason to reinvent the wheel.
I hope they have at least learned Word's bloated HTML lesson and do not repeat it...
My other post is a First.
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.
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.
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.
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
it's OpenDocument since it was finished. actually microsoft at first participated in oasis workgroup but withdrew. wonder why :)
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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$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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just the opposite: they should make their product on Windows work so well that it's easier to use it than Metro. If they do this, Metro will die on the vine. If they try to do what you propose, Metro will succeed brilliantly, because it will be your only choice on Windows, and like it or not, the majority of people run Windows. Why do you think you keep getting those silly .doc files in your email? :'}
Once LH achieves more penetration, the Metro format will be the standard,...
People give Microsoft _way_ too much credit. Even in ten years, there will be a very significant population of people _not_ running Longhorn. For example, half my family still uses Windows 98! I will still be using Windows 98 even past Longhorn's launch date, because my main desktop will be centered around Solaris and Linux for years to come.
Add that Microsoft is slipping ever so slowly in share, and I wouldn't be suprised if Longhorn never sees a majority share. Look at China and SE Asia, for example. They're signing deals for Linux desktops. Millions of them.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
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