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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."
Christ, Microsoft is like my boss - he takes on a million projects and finishes none.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
"Yes, a PDF reader exists....but for the love of god, it's the most bloated, slow, nag-infested document viewers I've ever used, and it only seems to get worse with each version."
Wow, those are pretty strong things to say about Ghostview.
8^)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Netscape had massive market share before IE was bundled with windows. Bundling with windows can do excellent things to your market share.
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.
Indeed, from Microsoft, "open and available for royalty-free licensing" typically means you can get a non-sublicensable license by sending them a letter. That's how it works for their network protocols stuff. Non-sublicensable meaning that it's not GPL2-compliant.
Remi Denis
> 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.
I am sick and tired of trying to give a poor explaination as to why a document; rtf, doc, wps, etc, will not open with the copy of the MS app they happen to be using because it was saved with the app on their previous system.
Heh. We keep a Mac in each of the PC labs, because it can open some of the weirder Works files from pc's and then save them in Office format files. So fucking weird.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.
Well you know the OSX display system is based on PDF right? So Preview itself is not rendering the PDF, it is just reading the data from the file and passing it to Quartz the systems display framework.
Windows display system is currently based on GDI, so any pdf renderer on windows must read the pdf, and then calculate how to draw the equivelent image using GDI commands, a much slower process. You couldn't port Preview to Windows without also porting Quartz, and then it wouldn't really be Windows anymore.
Windows can render WMF and EMF files really fast because those formats are basically a set of GDI operations streamed to a file.
This Metro format will have the same benifits on Windows as PDF does on OSX, Metro is based on Avalon and XAML, which will be built into Windows as the presentation model.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "