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
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...
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"
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
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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!
One of Adobe's flagship products (bonus points for naming the other),
... TypeStyler!
IntelliDraw? PageMaker? umm.... LiveMotion? wait, wait, it's
Dunno. I give up.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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