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Office 12 to Include Native PDF Support
parry writes "Microsoft announced today at the MVP summit that Office 12, the next version of Microsoft Office, will have native support for the PDF document format. Support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath." From the article: "Currently, on our OfficeOnline site, we are seeing over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support. That makes a pretty easy decision"
That's what they said about office 11, never happened. Hey, whatever happened to Xdoc?
Metro? Thy production team be disbanded...
So we just need to go search for Open Document?
Does this mean it will have PDF-import capabilities too? Or is this just export-only? It says on the article that it can publish to PDF. Just curious...
I don't know about you, but I can't wait for Microsoft Office with Pretty Darn Fast technology!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I thought that there was a big lawsuit a while back by adobe about the PDF standard..
... they could incorporate a minimalist, fast pdf viewer into Windows itself, I would happy. Ever since zip support was incorporated into XP, I've been so pleased that I've had no reason to download winzip. And the Windows "Picture and Fax" image viewer is exactly what I had wanted for a while- a fast, simple way to view images, zoom in, etc. That's what I would want for .pdf's in Windows, a simple way to quickly open, view, and print. And with Adobe's latest offerings getting bigger, more bloated, and more irritating with each new release, believe me, it can't come fast enough.
Thank God for www.oldversion.com.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X
"Redmond, start your photocopiers"
The next pasture is always greener
For those who haven't seen them yet, Office 12 Screenshots: http://pdc.xbetas.com/?page=o12preview1
WOW, PDF support in Office 12, amazing how innovative microsoft is... let me just print and save this amazing article through my Native PDF print driver here on my little ole' primitive Macintosh for later use...
how about a whole OS that can save to PDF? (cough...OS X)
MS is going to support another company's format (PDF) but they won't support OpenDoc - an OASIS format they indirectly helped create?
Sooner or later this sort of hypocrisy is going to catch up to them and their business practices. No doubt there are legal interpretations of this that will eventually have to be answered as well.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Isn't there such a thing hanging around as freeware already in Windows, btw?
So, I guess the PDF standard is here:
Embrace ***
Extend
Extinguish
It wont be too long before we all have to have Microsoft Document Reader (tm) installed somewhere on our boxen!
Microsoft didn't even invent pdf!
Say what you will about Microsoft, this is one company that knows how to innovate. Innovation runs in its blood. Microsoft really innovates like nobody else. Built-in PDF support is an excellent idea. No one ever thought about doing it but Microsoft did. Sometimes we are ready for their innovation as is the case with the PDF support. And sometimes Microsoft is ahead of the times as in the case of Microsoft Bob. This is one innovative company though.
Actually Word for the Mac has had PDF support for years.
My father's always been pissed at Microsoft for including PDF support in their Mac products but not in their PC products.
The real question though is what they mean by native PDF support. Will I be able to fire up Word, open a PDF document, edit it and save as a Word document that someone else using earlier versions of Word can open? I bet a significant portion of the searches they see for PDF support involve something on that level, rather than simply being able to print to PDF - if I've been able to do that on a Mac for this long (long before OSX had it natively) I'm sure there are many similar options for Windows users.
ps2pdf has been around since.. hell, as long as I can remember using Linux (probably before Office95). Since printing in Linux has always been based around postscript, I've never even thought about the fact that people have trouble printing to PDF.
PDF has been a target printer in Gnome for a long time. I reckon longer than OS X has been around.
...has had this for a long time.
But, let me be one of the first to say - "Its about freakin' TIME!"
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
So they're about to offer the same thing that OpenOffice.org has offered for ages?
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
Is it not amazing that MS is supporting PDF? AFTER MA made its decision with use on Open Document formats? I mean if this is such a great feature, then why was it not discussed at the PDC? Oh yeah, forgot at that time the MA decision was not final. So I wish MS would admit that they are doing this so that they can be MA decision compliant (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,390203 96,39215912,00.htm) and not because "the customer" wanted it. BECAUSE the customer has wanted it for ages!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I liked Openoffice because it could save a file in PDF format. Maybe I'll swtich to MS Office. Nobody can read my Openoffice resume anyways.
This most likely IS their competing format. I suspect Microsoft is just bundling their Office Killer with their Acrobat Killer into a nice, neat package. It's more efficient from a business stand point and gives each of the "Killers" more of an effect. Why buy a seperate license for Adobe or create a program to teach workers how to use OpenOffice when Microsoft Office has familiarity AND a bundled PDF creator in one.
I wonder if Microsoft will suffer any sort of anti-competitive lawsuits over this measure, assuming it is successful and isn't Vaporware as a vast majority of their announcements for current projects are. Of course, with the acquisition of Flash, I'm sure Adobe will be able to stick it out and possibly create an even better PDF product. I hope my faith in the Free Market is well founded.
If that is what they're doing, this could be pretty useful.... But I also would not trust MSWord to import PDF files and screw with them. Look at what they did with HTML import-export -- and that's just an open markup language, not a complete document format. Just imagine how badly they can screw up PDF if they put their minds to it.
Great - now they're finally catching up with Open Office :)
Actually, I'm wondering. If they're really implementing PDF support in that many products, wouldn't it be easier to just do it one place - say in Vista? Windows Vista could have native PDF support, and in turn all the programs would have PDF support - not just the above mentioned.
So, how's about you, me, and a few thousands of our friends search for OpenDocument support?
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
PDF has been a target printer in Gnome for a long time. I reckon longer than OS X has been around.
The GNOME project was started in August 1997
OSX around in one form or another since 1989
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
everyone on slashdot bashes microsoft non-stop and its very annoying.
take for example pdf support. it became a feature that maybe they didn't do first but realized there is a need for it and they added it. are they supposed to never add features they didn't originally think of? isn't the most important thing that they reconize it is something customers want and they give it to them?
also i'm sick and tired of hearing that there's no innovation from microsoft. i've used office 12 and it is very cool and has lots of very useful innovative features. the menu tabs make finding what you need much easier than digging through drop downs. theres also an instant preview when you mouse over different fonts, and it displays it right in the document. same thing if you're adding tables, an instant preview of the table appears as you are creating one. these are just a few quick examples i thought were great.
will they get credit for these types of innovations? not on slashdot.
-mr silver
yeah doomed,... riightt, that makes sense.
Foxit reminds me of OS X's Preview every time I use it. Fast, lean, and loads quickly. It may not read some of the more advanced stuff that PDFs may contain, but it's great for previewing/printing. Free as in beer. No install required, so I even carry a copy on my thumbdrive.
KDE, GNOME _and_ cli-based Linux have had pdf output support for far, far longer than Apple operating systems - in their specific incarnations.
in noting that only a few thousand people give a shit about OpenDocument
Coincidence that this announcement comes a few days after Massachusetts goes for PDF as one of the approved formats to use in government? Methinks not...
The future is in beta
PDF is the most miserable format to have to read the way that most of us do most of our reading -- on a computer. I've got lousy (ie over-50) eyes, so I magnify everything with that zoom magnifier so that the text fills the screen horizontally. What happens when I scroll down? Because pdf is for paper, and paper has different right and left margins depending on whether you're on a right or left page, the next page won't have its print filling my screen, it's off to the left or right. Play with the horizontal scroll bar every page. Thanks, pdf. Then, because it thinks the printed page is everything, Ctrl-A doesn't select 'All' text, just all text on the current page. And don't get me started on documents presented newspaper style, where I've gotta keep scrolling up and down, left and right. And page down gives the next page of text (according to the hypothetical paper), not the next screen of text according to the actual viewing device. That's so close to useless, you'd think MS invented it. The objective in software is to achieve device independence. The PDF viewer manages to achieve device dependence on a device that isn't even in use (paper). Paper is going to be an exception. A printable e-book would be nice, but if I want a paper book, I don't need a computer. To make the computer subservient to the dead tree is upside-down design.
It costs less than $10 and is great. That is if you actually wish to pay for it. Just another printer option in windoze.
What a stupid post, honestly...
He clearly said as long as OS X has been around, not as long as it has been around in one form or another.
By your logic, Windows XP has been around since 1995, when Windows 95 was released, since they share the Explorer shell. Oh, wait, Windows NT 3.1 used an earlier version of the XP kernel, so Windows XP has been around even longer.
In-case you misunderstood what I am getting at, he means since OS X was released as a product that came in a box that said OS X on it. It being owned by NeXT, not containing Aqua, and only sharing some base code doesn't really count.
Uhm, why? Is it because jpegs are much more concise ways of delivering that free porn, or do you have an objection to PDF as a format in general?
isnt it supposed to be
o pe=DC%2CEM%2CES%2CFX%2CHA%2CHP%2CQZ%2CRC%2CTC%2CXT &Query=open+document+support&SubmitSearch=+Go+
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/results.aspx?Sc
Metro? Thy production team be disbanded...
More likely PDF support will be built through Metro, as basically Metro is the XPS system in a Document.
As for the post above... Silly...
PDF will be rendered using Metro technologies is my guess, as they are not coding to the GDI but XPS. XPS is the new Windows/Document/Printer XAML format that the OS uses for virtually EVERYTHING.
Even CALLS between applications in exchanging data will pass XAML XPS information, let allow this is how the OS passes info to the Screen to Draw and the Pinter to Print.
GDI conversion layers are included for both way compatibility for Screen and Printer. i.e. your app uses XAML(WPF/XPS) to display something, but your driver only knows GDI, it will convert it.
Does everything Microsoft does have to be sinister?
How about this for a 'senerio'... For better performance and to take advantage of some of the new drawing capabilities in the WPF, chances are Adobe will even make a PDF reader for Windows that uses XAML/XPS/WPF to render the PDF information to the screen and the printer.
So does that make Adobe evil too?
These are such borderline (as a lot of people get them confused) concepts, but yet different. Metro is an extention of how elegant the new 3D Vector system built in Windows is - and also how different it is from anything Apple or anyone else has even attempted to do. Bascially when new applications for Windows are rendering cool graphics on the screen or printer, they are using XML in the from of XAML - which looks a lot like SVG, but has a 'chunk' of different abilities and purposes than SVG does.
So Metro is basically just saying, ok instead of drawing this to the screen, save it in a Document, a Metro Document - because the communication system for Graphic and any form of Media content throughout Windows is built in a simple and efficient XML format.
I though Slashdot like using concepts like XML?
Any reason why exactly? Or are you one of those people who will make decisions about technology solutions for your business based on your personal like or dislike for a particular company?
I've used ps2pdf and various gs options with Samba to create network printers available to Windows machines that can print to to various types of tif, gif, jpeg, pdf and other printers. We use it in the IT department as a support tool for the users. Someone emails a user a visio file or some other type of off the wall file format they need to look at? First thing they do is email the IT department with something like "How do I print this?". We open our copy of Visio or whatever app we can find that works for what they have which our 1000 or so users do not have and print the file to our virtual network printers which converts it something they can print and open and use from their desktops. Sure, it is not as user friendly as converting or printing to the PDF printer that is supplied with using the full version of Acrobat but this is VERY flexible and much cheaper. Another good use is converting multi page tifs that are users recieve that are not in a standard fax format but should be. Quite often, our users recieve a two or three page tif file that is over 2MB in size but is nothing more then a black and white document and the sender used 24 bit RGB to scan it.
This link is very old but provides the basis for setting up various network printer convertors using Samba.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Yeah, a lot of MS programs do stuff like that. :/
Well, at least you'll never have to worry about them integrating it into the operating system, a la IE. Fully functional office software bundled with an OS, at no extra cost? Not on MY watch.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
Ha, you don't understand Microsoft very well. My guess is that the PDF support will be severly crippled. In which case, they will make the PDF format over time look less desirable than their own competing format. I mean, didn't they do the same thing with Java, releasing their own crippled JVM included in every copy of windows? Microsoft eventually replaced it with .NET.
What better way to defeat the competition than by releasing a crippled version of their format that's automatically bundeled with your system, and then coming out with a better "solution".
Just a theory.
native support for the PDF document format
In other words,
native support for the Portable Document Format document format
live(free) || die;
Your post is the most miserable format,
I have read compare to all the other posts, especially when
the way that most of us do most of our reading is on a computer.
Seriously, use some return please, next time.
Thank you!
for awhile now. Which is great, open up presentation, make one, and save it as a PDF makes for great easy marketing PDF's. =)
Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought it was the opposite: that they extended the JVM to support proprietary, "Windows-only" features. They could try doing the same to PDF, but Adobe clearly has the IP rights to the PDF spec.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Don't worry, there plenty of businesses that want to make money that have no problem with PDFs.
Give ACrobat Speedup a try http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.ph p to get it. Basically it turns off all the damn plugins that ACrobat loads by default. This does mean that some advanced stuff won't work but who cares? You never see PDFs with it anyhow.
It really does drop the loading time singificantly.
You don't need Acrobat Reader to use PDFs. I use OS X's Preview and happily stay away from the 50MB crap Adobe calls a PDF reader.
There have been free Mac-native PDF solutions since about the same time, including a port of ps2pdf. The grandparent was probably referring to single click PDF generation in Mac OS X: you don't even have to pick it as your printer. It's definitely very convenient having it available as a command button in every print window.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ is the site that I know for it but at any rate. One of the undergrads asked for it in the labs so I checked it out. Seems to work very well, it correctly rendered everything thrown at it from sinple Word documents, to complex Excel sheets, to Matlab output to other PDFs. Thus far, I've seen no crashes and no goof ups. It doesn't have all the features that Acrobat does but it doesn't much matter for most things. It installs a printer driver that works well and creates usable PDFs.
MS was close to this with Win95 which had both Wordpad and the Exchange client (now known as Outlook). Wordpad is still around in WinXP and probably will be in Vista too. One wonders why they didn't have an ExcelPad or PointPad (powerpoint) included with the OS as a marketing tool to push users into the Office suite.
I can't say much to this except "you're a goddamned moron". You can't get much better than a cross platform, free-and-open, print-the-same-anywhere format with good compression support and a host of other features, developed by the industry leader in professional printing. It's the best thing for information interchange since ASCII. It's too bad you're missing out.
When life gives you lemons, you CLONE those lemons, and make SUPER-LEMONS. -- Dr. Cinnamon Scudworth, Ph.D
You actually said "simple and efficient" and "XML" in the same sentence. I would have shot myself after doing that. The current trend of "Its XML so its better" is really annoying. Specifically, everything which is changed to and XML based protocol becomes bloated and takes a lot more bandwidth to transmit and more processing power to read and use. It makes sense in some areas, such as certain internet protocols, but its makes no sense whatsoever in high-bandwidth/high-speed applications such as drawing to the screen. So, as to your questions, Microsoft is evil and Apple's Quartz is tons better.
If office tweleve looks like a website, how can you distiguish it from real webpages. Hey wait a second, that's..
Here is a link to a Channel 9 demo of Office 12 and some of the new features: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1147 20
-mr silver
And this odd need to go "Ooo look, Apple was t3h first!!!!111"
Who. Cares.
Ok, great, so Apple got PDF viewing back with OS 10 (please note it's viewing that's built in, MS is talking about PDF creation as well). How does that makes them special?
Also what's real intersting if you are all up on copying then what about the OS-X kernel? Rather than make their own, or buy one like BeOS, they decided to grab Mach and use that. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but there's no innovation there, it was copying, it was grabbing a product that already worked well and using it. For that matter so was PDF integration. Adobe is responasable for PDF, not Apple.
I fail to understand the reason behind these kind of posts that crop up on Slashdot all the time. Who cares if Apple did something before someone else? What relivance is it? As it happens Microsoft had a production 32-bit OS with full memory protection and preemption (NT 3.1) almost a decade before Apple did. But, really, who cares? That in no way diminshes OS-X or it's capabilities, and Microsoft wasn't the first by a longshot to have that.
So really, knock it off. Who cares who did what first? What's relivant is what's out NOW, and what's comming out in the near future. I don't care that Linux wasn't the first OS to have a nice GUI, I care that it NOW has a nice GUI that I can use. Trying to pretend something is better because it was first is silly.
If only there was some kind of extensible document format that let people have it be both printable and viewable on a monitor! We'd have to let the style sheets cascade, but then we could even support things like text-to-speech from the same document meant for printing and viewing! Hey, why stop there, why not make it a markup language so that we can add other neat features, like hyper links!
Wow, though, that's a lot of standards work. We might need a standards body to oversee it. Maybe someday, people will start to encode information in this format so that we can view it comfortable on our monitors without fucking around with stupid documents.
-=-
Sarcasm aside, it's totally not a technology issue -- it's a people issue. PDF has its place in forms you want printed off, because it currently has momentum. I have no idea why people resist using the alternate solutions which have added benefits beyond the PDF momentum.
Bug the people who put up PDFs for use. People using PDFs where they should be using XML is lot like people using Shockwave flash where they should be using XML.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Just to clarify: any OS X program that can print can produce PDF files.
Office 12 might be going to include PDF support but I really wonder why they don't just make the Windows print system capable of producing PDF files.
What's the bets that this 'innovative' native Office12 support for pdf will only really display properly in Office 12???
This is all to get back in with Massachusetts but will enable them to foist their perverted XML into the mix.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
They were all generated by baldy as he bounced around the giant touch pad.
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Uh. He said PDF. That seems specific enough that there should be no reason why we need to branch into ridiculous speculations about lawsuits in a scenario that is very obviously contrary to reality.
Lay off the Microsoft Is Evil pills man . . . they are making you see things that aren't there.
This is not some new, and innovative feature from Microsoft. Openoffice.org has had pdf export for ages!
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Annoying? I can see that you are new here. no "maybe" - they didn't.
Not at all! Otherwise they'd have next to NO PRODUCT TO SELL WHATSOEVER.
What's with whiny, pussy sacks of pig shit like you who go ballistic if someone even thinks about the Mac? Aw. Is wittle Sycraft-fu (translation: ooo! I'll us a martial arts handle so I'll sound like a big shot. Yeah! My hands are lethal weapons! yeah!) upset at the turn of the topic. Oh, you poor little baby!
Change your soiled panties and shut the fuck up, loser.
Well, Microsoft did extend their JVM with some extra ties into windows and classes that specifically made it easier to write Windows applications that were run under Java (but not write once, run anywhere). However, this was back at Java version 1.0. Microsoft totally didn't bother upgrading their JVM to support features in Java 1.2, and above. Thus, most computers were shipped with a crippled, outdated version of Java.
The problem is, that most web java apps were based on this crippled version of Java. Since that's the case, if you're a web developer you're not going to force people to upgrade your version, so you just stay with what comes standard on Windows. In this way, Microsoft prevented Sun's Java from gaining a significant foothold on Windows.
from what I've written, then I DO need a computer to work the LaTeX code!
I guess this is some more proof that the OpenOffice.org team is doing a good job and Microsoft is feeling the heat. They aren't in any immediate danger of big losses, but long term they will be in better shape by supporting widely adopted open formats/standards. Afterall, they won the office suite war years ago, supporting things like pdf (and opendocument eventually) is not going to cost them customers. It will help them keep them along with the bundling deals they now enjoy with the major PC manufacturers. This is the same as money from the tobacco industry going into stop smoking campaigns, it really isn't going to put big tobacco out of business because people pick up smoking for nonrational reasons and then are ensnared by a powerful addiction. Most large organizations are hooked on Office already, giving them pdf export helps keep many from even thinking about dropping it cold turkey for something like OO.org.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
It seems to me that this is competition at its finest. OOo offers built-in PDF export capability. People find it useful, et voila, Microsoft Office introduces it, too.
Same thing happened with Opera and Mozilla offering tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking. Microsoft's shared source program is probably a reaction to the rise of open source. And what about Microsoft's push for security? Is that just a reaction to the many many security breaches that happen on their platform, or is it another feature they're trying to copy from the competition? Maybe one day we'll even get a usable command line from them.
Anyway, the point is that even with the small market share that Microsoft's competitors have (on the desktop), Microsoft is working hard to integrate the popular features the competition offers.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Metro is an extention of how elegant the new 3D Vector system built in Windows is - and also how different it is from anything Apple or anyone else has even attempted to do. Bascially when new applications for Windows are rendering cool graphics on the screen or printer, they are using XML in the from of XAML - which looks a lot like SVG, but has a 'chunk' of different abilities and purposes than SVG does. So Metro is basically just saying, ok instead of drawing this to the screen, save it in a Document, a Metro Document
So after you get done hyperventilating over this super-exciting "new" Microsoft innovation, why don't you read up on OS X and what it has done with PDF for the past five years? Quartz, also vector-based, is built on the PDF object graph, which is itself a subset of Postscript, and has allowed applications to save their contents to a PDF for years. It's one of the reasons OS X is so great with desktop publishing--what you see really is exactly what you'll get, down to the typography spacing, because the same graphics operations drawing the screen are also what get sent to the printer and what get saved to PDF.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Uh, no, they released a JVM that spanked everyone else's in performance. It sure as hell wasn't "crippled".
Wow, that was the most breathless shilling I have seen in a long time. So MS took SVG and did an embrace and extend and it's AWESOME!. Yea right.
evil is as evil does
Or not. Whatever. *yawn*
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...at least I'll no longer be forced to send my CV as .doc.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Adobe's spec allows you to embed a digital signature in a PDF.
Trying to pretend something is better because it was first is silly.
First and... still only, right? Office 12 is still vapor.
For years and years, I've been able to create PDF's on a Mac from any program that prints, including Word and Excel, with the click of a button. Microsoft says this is one of their most requested features and now, years later, they are promising similar functionality for the next version of Office for Windows.
People want it. Mac users have been able to do it for years. Windows users haven't, without mucking around buying extra software like Acrobat. That makes it better, right? Sometimes those Mac users prattling on about the Mac being better actually have a point. You might want to listen sometime. Microsoft did.
Now, in reality, I'm no Mac bigot. I prefer my Unix-style operating systems closer to the bone. (With a little more work, ps2pdf does the same job on Linux.) But this is an oft-requested feature. I get this request all the time from Windows users. And usually I point them at OpenOffice, which also has native PDF support.
One has to wonder if this has anything to do with MA. PDF meets their standards for open documents, doesn't it? MS won't support OpenDocument because they won't support a true read-write open format that will actually foster competition. And they can't actually open up their XML format in a way that will foster competition. But they can put Metro on the chopping block - it was a stupid idea anyway - and embrace a (conventionally) read-only open format like PDF which meets state requirements while not helping Office competitors.
Oh good god. That is karma whoring at its best. Do you truly think that you can Slashdot MSDN?
For anyone interested in reading about Avalon versus Quartz and developer reaction to it, here are a few thought-provoking links:
t pc/f/48409524/m/1820008357316 131.aspxo nxaml_f/
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/
http://blogs.msdn.com/dancre/archive/2004/03/25/9
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/04/14/aval
"Sufferin' succotash."
As other posts have pointed out, document signing is the only real way to proof documents. Your mention of a major engineering firm "securing" documents this way makes me feel kind of uneasy...
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
Even ASCII had interchange issues with the nasty end of line differences between platforms. Luckily, most text editors, except for the windows notepad, have no problem with that today.
They could try doing the same to PDF, but Adobe clearly has the IP rights to the PDF spec.
Just like Sun has the IP rights to the Java spec?
They are cutting win32 api to lead the customers to the next honey pit, .NET. They need to move the customers around, because otherwise the competition would catch up with an increase of win32 api complience (WINE, nt2unix, wind/u, MainWin, Willows Twin API) and wabi complience (WINE, Cedega). If Microsoft stays put, they will lose the win32-leg. This is whyt they will cut it away. They will be standing on two legs, and are trying to grow an additional leg (at customers expense) called .NET.
Adding good support for .pdf is like self-amputating the (quickly rotting) .doc leg. After this amputation, Microsoft will be standing for a while (before and if .NET is adopted ***) on one leg, binary compatibility. This is where they really excel. The windows software out there is so buggy, that it is a huge task to make an binary layer that matches the bugs in the early Windows, changes modes around to match the various Windows versions, etc. Typically, I can easily run about 5 % of old Windows code using WINE, whereas about 50 % runs on a modern version of Windows (I am talking about software that Microsoft has not tested within their labs, like computer games made in Finland for Finnish kids, but to some extend this ranges to other multimedia software and games, up to Tiger Woods Golf 2000, which does not run on latest Windows). However, if people would see Microsoft balancing with one leg, there would be much more money pushing it over by an improved binary compatibility.
In my opinion it is very dangerous for Microsoft to simultaneously cut two legs, win32 and .doc.
***) In the company where I work at, the initial enthusiasm for .NET is dying in the upper management. The initial projects implemented with .NET have been near catastrophes in engineering productivity and quality, whereas our C++ work has been okeyish. Also, the middle management is seeing the interoperability difficulties with C++/.NET -- C++ is still needed at the algorithm level to gain competitive speed, and the interoperability issues with .NET are huge.
-- Imperial units must die --
Just to see what happens, I'm gonna search for LaTeX support 30,001 times a week.
Corel WordPerfect has had it for even longer time: since version 9 at least (and that was 5 or 6 years ago). Of course, just like for OOo, it didn't support all the nifty advanced PDF features right from the start (e.g. version 9 didn't even support hyperlinks, IIRC). KOffice too has had PDF support for quite some time, IIRC, and both ways, even, which is something exceptional in the wordprocessing field. MSO does look like "the late runner" here.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Microsoft totally didn't bother upgrading their JVM to support features in Java 1.2, and above.
Slow down on the spin, you're making me dizzy. Sun *sued* Microsoft over breach of contract, because MS added classes to the java.* package. The license specified that any vendor-added classes had to live outside the official name space, so Sun won the lawsuit and got an injunction that prevented MS from distributing future versions.
Microsoft prevented Sun's Java from gaining a significant foothold on Windows.
Sun prevented Java from gaining a significant foothold on Windows, not MS. Sun was embarrassed because MS's JVM for Windows was faster than Sun's own, and acted out of sheer spite with the ammunition they had on hand.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
The majority, if not all, of the issues you describe are with the viewer, not the format. Moreover, many are solved by learning to use the viewer. Continuous view, with an appropriate page fit setting, will solve the majority of the problems you've described.
Personally, while I don't have poor vision, I do like large and highly readable text since I work on computers a *lot*, and I have a very high resolution display as well. I rarely find PDF to be a problem in this regard. I'm generally as happy with PDF as with HTML or any other format, and much happier with it than with some.
I work in newspaper publishing, and I can assure you that PDF is for *much* more than a paper replacement. It's quite simply the only sane format to use when you want to aggregate several smaller jobs into a larger one - such as when designing a page with client-supplied advertisments in it. PDF lets the recipient provide a basic specification (all fonts embedded, PDF 1.3, 10cm by 12cm, CMYK colour) and rely on that - without having to worry about different apps, incompatible versions, fonts, different platforms, or all sorts of other garbage.
It's also great for archiving anything where you need to preserve the appearance, not just the content. It's not a bad idea to archive the content as well, since extracting content from PDF can be painful (it's a page description language, not a traditional document format), but it's darn handy.
...in two years Microsoft will have a proprietary version, and in four years, that'll be the standard. (Remember Java? Or that one thing, uhhh...oh, yeah, adherence to the HTML spec?)
The bright side: at least we know, for sure, that it'll be poor.
Microsoft eats everyone's lunch; PDF's just the next thing on the plate.
-- often wrong; never in doubt
Pretty much every application, game etc comes with a PDF manual instead of a printed one. I tend to like to read stuff on my PDA, and it's IMPOSSIBLE to read PDF documents on a PDA with their version of Adobe. Their reflow option is useless. I have never had a PDF document that actually "reflowed". You have to zoom in just to read the text, and only then you can only see the first half of a sentence.
Instead I just convert PDF to HTML, but that doesnt' always work, and it's difficult to find freeware programs to do it.
It's not that simple.
I have always said that pdf support is one area where Linux smokes Windows hands down. I have wanted someone (anyone) else to give me some alternitave to reader for Windows for a long time.
Take your ad-ware bundled bloated crap elsewhere Adobe! When MS says they have had high demand to support the format I believe them.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I don't use windows, but it sounds like this is saying there's no current way to print a PDF document in windows from every application without some third party add-on? Is that really true?
I'm in disbelief! for years now I've been asking people to "send me a PDF" of their word or whatever document assuming Windows had this like. Apparently that must be difficult to do on windows?
Amazing. Well we mac users can feel smug about something else now. Welcome to the modern age windows users. heh.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
``if you are looking at security as a feature then your product is already an insecure piece of software.''
Still, I think that's the way many businesses (including Microsoft) see it. Microsoft didn't start their big security initiative until after the many exploits became a serious threat to their reputation. This view is supported by the fact that they have long refused to remove features that provide usability at the expense of security, such as automatic log in, ActiveX, overly powerful macros, etc. Now, people demand better security, so Microsoft works to convince them that they are providing it. It's just another feature.
``so no, microsoft is probably not "copying security" they are the ones on the front lines. who does redhat go to when they realize they need security as a part of the product life cycle? who wrote the leading book on writing secure code? let me tell you, it didnt come from oracle, linux, redhat... it was microsoft.''
You'll make me laugh. I think Microsoft is seriously making an effort to make their software more secure, but I can't much accept they are at the front line. I can't vouch for Red Hat, but OpenBSD certainly seems to be working much harder and be much further along than Microsoft when it comes to security.
True, Microsoft issued a book. However, that doesn't mean that they are serious about what's in there. Microsoft Research produces many great findings every year, but many of these don't make it into Microsoft products, at least not until years later. Also, it's not like the Microsoft book is the only reference on security, and it's not like what's in there is particularly newsworthy.
``yes, microsoft is definitely reactive. but they also react with a bang. they realized their shit was insecure, and they were losing billions on it. being capitalist pigs they wanted to keep their shareholder value.''
Although your wording is a bit more explicit, you're saying about the same thing I meant when saying that security is just another feature to Microsoft.
Note that Microsoft isn't the only one this applies to at all. I think most software groups see security as just one feature. Even OpenBSD, which is generally regarded as the most security conscious project, puts security besides other things, such as POSIX compliance and performance.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This is very odd. I've seen almost no comments along the lines of "Yay, native PDF support in this software that lots of people use, now maybe they'll stop emailing me bloody word docs."
Rather, there's lots of ranting about innovation, and lots of people saying that $[software] did it first. Yep, sure. I have an unpleasant revelation for you - *none* of the software industry is exactly a powerhouse of innovation. They all implement ideas that came from each other, improve them or butcher them along the way, and try to compete. OO.o may have had PDF export first, but it's UI is a bad clone of an even worse UI (Office '97). Office might be picking up PDF export pretty late in the game, but on the other hand it looks like they're working to fix the train wreck that is office suite user interfaces. Similarly, Apple and Microsoft are busy chasing each other, nicking each other's ideas, and coming up with the odd good one along the way. Arguing about who is most innovative is just not interesting. Ideas come from all the involved parties, and everybody steals them. Big deal.
To me, this just looks like MS doing something sensible, often requested by customers, and perhaps long overdue. It's beyond me why all the comments here are so overwhelmingly negative.
Slashdot isn't usually this bad, folks. What's gotten into this bunch today?
For those talking about printer-driver based PDF export, it's not that simple. Here's what I posted earlier. Summary: OS based would be nice, but a simple generic print interface would be insufficiently flexible so something more would be needed anyway. Anyway, if they built PDF export into the OS, I bet this crowd would be screaming about monopolies, bundling, and anticompetitive business practices.
I find all this pretty disappointing. There are posts on the forum thread with the new user interface screenshots that are foaming crazy, and they all prominently say "I support open source!" or rant about OSS. Yet so many folks here wonder why nobody is interested in listening when someone has something constructive and rational to say. I begin to wonder if the crazies are the loud majority, rather than the loud minority...
...when you've found the shift key and learnt how to use apostrophes, I may take notice of your opinion. At the moment it's so hard to read that I got the impression you were twelve and gave up.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Dos x.yy on the IBM-PC.
MS did not pioneer this technology, but when they (Bill) took/stole/bought the existing tech, and made the deal with IBM, the floodgates opened. The combo of IBM-PC hardware and cheap DOS software made it possible for many people and companies, at the time, to have a kick at the cat.
This deal was not an innovation, or an invention, but it sure as hell changed the way 90+ percent of us look at and use computers today.
I'd call it fate
All these searches will have been people trying to find a fix for the problems that arise after installing Office 2003 and discovering that adobe acrobat 5 or lower stops working on some machines. Word2003 tries to open pdf files and the explorer file link to pdf documents gets broken.
But not every machine has the same problem...
Thanks Microsoft you rock!
Cheers, thank you. And while we're at it, just because some people come up with an "open" format like OpenDocument doesn't mean there's a moral imperative to support it in every piece of software. If I came up with a new "open" image format, should everyone support that too just because it is open? What if the format sucks? What if OpenDocument is not really the universal document format some people want it to be? What if you think Office AND OpenOffice are both fundamentally bad ideas (talk about kicking UNIX methodology to the curb). /Debian user
Most people are under the impression that the PDF format is somehow "slow". I for one know it doesn't have to render slow; it opens fast in xpdf (under Linux). Why is it that it takes so long to open a PDF document in Acrobat Reader (at least, that is what I hear)? It could very well be that it would be fast in MS Office 12, just like in xpdf.
Openoffice.org and WordPerfect Office have had pdf support for long enough. They are only catching up with competition. I don't think that is anti-competitive.
Don't worry about why... NineNine rarely follows reason.
Put identity in the browser.
MS did not pioneer this technology,
The whole point of the argument is "Microsoft don't innovate, they buy/borrow/steal".
but when they (Bill) took/stole/bought the existing tech, and made the deal with IBM, the floodgates opened. The combo of IBM-PC hardware
And Compaq reverse engineering the BIOS.... The PC wasn't intended to be nearly as open as it wound up being.
and cheap DOS software made it possible for many people and companies, at the time, to have a kick at the cat.
Atari, Acorn, Commodore - all were producing reasonably cheap systems at the time. But none of them had this kind of advertising.
Yet again MS copies someone else. OpenOffice has had this since 1.1.4. Which was out months ago. Go figure.
Goten Xiao
Next time your computer is busy, say, with another anti-virus update, please take a moment to thank those nice people over at OpenOffice.org for including this PDF-function since just about ever and thereby putting pressure on Microsoft that it couldn't ignore. And when the new version of IE comes out, send a little om of thanks to those nice people over at Mozilla, whose Firefox browser ripped Ballmer so bad that he decided they had to update that monster of theirs after all.
Now, those of us who actually use OpenOffice.org and Firefox (and Thunderbird and Linux and BSD) realize that you are either not too bright because you are still paying $400 a shot for MS Office and whatever it is they charge for Windows these days, or that you are dishonest -- a criminal! -- because you ripped it off. Shame! But we do believe you are intelligent enough to realize that the only reason Microsoft is doing jack at all anymore is because they have Open Source (and the BSD-based Mac OS X) breathing down their necks, and you should be honest enough to admit it. Our guys -- yes, yes, and the Apple people, we do admit it -- are forcing innovation down their throats one byte at at time.
Okay, it's back to that virus scanner update for you. And no daydreaming about what you could do for your family or buy for yourself with those hundreds of dollars (or euros or pounds) that you will soon be paying for MS Office 12 and that "Tiger"-clone called Longhorn or Vista or whatever it is now. After all, monopolies don't pay for themselves, you know. Gates and Ballmer are counting on people like you for their next billion or two. Or three. Or four. Don't disappoint them!
Signed, laughing his head off
Microsoft Document Image format or .MDI . The files were actually a bit smaller than PDFs as well. But you had to have a new version of office to view them (Unless there is a free viewer like there is for .PPT files, I never checked)
Then again, as one of the decision makers in our company about what we are going to buy/upgrade I can say that both Vista and Office 12 will not be in scope for a looooong time. We'd possibly even consider moving to a linux desktop instead, depending on how draconian Vista is, how well-integrated the linux desktop in question is, and how much retraining is involved.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
XML is great as a document format (which is what it was invented for), but that is where its usefulness stops. For more generic data representation, XML is not only clumsy and bloated, but also lacking in capabilities. There are tons of already existing technologies that are many times better (my favorite being s-expressions, but even JSON is better than XML).
For more info, including some examples.
This is a response to the decision by Massachusetts, make no mistake. Microsoft have probably had some PDF support for some time but haven't released it. What this allows Microsoft to do is strong-arm Massachusetts into accepting Office based on PDF support, while at the same time all their employees will save in the default format which is of course the Office one.
However, that isn't going to work because Massachusetts have specifically stated that they want their documents in Open Document format or PDF by default - they don't want the option of saving to them while some Office suite goes off and does its own thing bypassing them.
so Sun won the lawsuit and got an injunction that prevented MS from distributing future versions
Microsoft also got told by the court that they had to fix the JVM that they stopped shipping and then start shipping it for two months till their agreement expired.
Sun prevented Java from gaining a significant foothold on Windows
I think Sun could have done better at trying to convince developers not to use MS extensions and to write once run anywhere code. The fact that Microsoft were including GDI and MFC code in their JDK and not other sections of code (Which were supposed to be in there such as JNI and RMI) didn't help the situation. Namely because developers could use the MS extentions thinking that they were part of the Java standard.
As far as I can see with the amount of apps that were around at the time that didn't work because of different versions of Java this seemed to work pretty well.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Please go and look up the definition of irony in a decent dictionary. I have a suspicion that English is not your first language. The grandparent post is dripping with it.
It's a technique very common with postings from the UK, and it goes back a long way. Well educated English people in particular have a tendency to say the exact opposite of what they mean for humorous effect, and if you are not part of their social group you will miss the body language and the linguistic signifiers that indicate this. Equally well educated North Americans get it. Most of the rest of the world doesn't. Before writing a serious reply to a post that seems to say something really contrary to received knowledge on Slashdot, check for irony.
Does this just mean built-in support for exporting to PDF (a la OpenOffice), or are we actually talking about the ability to open a PDF, make changes, and save? The former would be nice, but the same effect can be achieved with various freely available utilities that allow "printing" to PDF from any application, so it wouldn't really be a very big deal. However, if we're talking about the ability to actually open PDFs and edit them, that's entirely another matter, and could be a really compelling feature for some people.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Wrong
The fact that Microsoft were including GDI and MFC code in their JDK and not other sections of code
*SIGH* Do you even know what MFC is?
Just to clarify: any OS X program that can print can produce PDF files.
:(
Just to clarify more: OS X does not produce PDF files with embedded fonts. This means that you cannot *guarantee* that the recipient sees the same thing that you printed. This happend to me while sending a advertisement layout to a local newspaper.
Very not good.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
but your point is well taken
The Admin and the Engineer
http://www.cutepdf.com/
Been using it for years. Great printer driver; It just works. Even with my CAD application.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I'm half impressed.
PDF export in Office 12 at least has the potential for less people sending me Word documents and then having to email them back asking for a non-Word version and that no, I don't have Comic Blippo New Helvetica font installed so your doc looks like shit and none of the html links work.
But Microsoft have put this in the wrong place. It should be in the OS, not in Office. Then PDF creation would be available to all applications including those people who haven't upgraded to the latest version of Office yet.
It's a pity they copied OpenOffice and not Mac OSX, in other words. Redmond's photocopiers have been copying the wrong thing. Don't the Windows Office team ever talk to the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft. MacBU often come up with much better software than their Windows counterparts.
Actually, if you look at the Massachusetts decision, they support OpenDocument *or* PDF. I'm guessing that Microsoft is going to propose that "Microsoft doesn't need to support OpenDocument. You can still work with MS Office12 but archive the PDF output so MSOffice can stay in Massachusetts".
Microsoft Foundation Classes a way of getting events, drawing dialog boxes that sorta shit. Yes I know what it is, I have been a sysadmin for the past 10 years, you sorta pick up a couple of things along the way. Sorry that I put that badly. They included ways to use MFC and GDI directly from java if memory serves me correctly. Basically they were extending the JVM, which although was allowed, they were doing it in the java.* area which they weren't allowed to do.
They also used the Java trademark without permission (They used the steaming cup logo in IE 4 although it wasn't Java compliant)
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Acrobat Reader is slow because it comes with a crapload of plugins used only extremely rarely. Remove them and it's great. The copy/paste abilities are really good with the most recent version, came in handy recently.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Well, if they had done this 10 years ago when they should have, it wouldn't be looked at in such a bad light. But to do it now, right after their row with Massachusetts and when they've been blowharding so much about Metro, what else do you expect? I bet Metro could pump out OpenDocument formatted files easily enough too. What benign motive do you think is preventing them from doing that?
I wonder if Microsoft will suffer any sort of anti-competitive lawsuits
If it's from the DOJ then they won't care. Even if they're found guilty nothing will happen.
Gee, why would MS need to admit so many people want a feature that they don't provide? Could it be that so many people are familiar with (at least hearing about) PDF support built-in to OpenOffice.org and Mac OS X?
Before OpenOffice.org came out with the PDF and Flash support built-in, the biggest draw to the business users I knew was OpenOffice.org's price and compatibility with MS Office. But, once PDF and Flash were built-in a number of business people I knew were willing to switch (or, parallel use) for this feature. A number asked if this was available in MS Office. When I told them about the license fee and kludgey interface for Acrobat they were very disappointed.
Those unaware of Mac OS X are surprised to find PDF creation built-in to everything printable. And with Tiger's ability to compress and encrypt PDF's there is less reason to consider Acrobat (unless specific features are needed).
Good for Microsoft to finally see the light and put the screws to Adobe by supporting PDF directly and natively.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
My un-funny joke up there wasn't meant as a dig at the PDF format. Instead, I was imagining that Microsoft's PR department was good enough that they could announce PDF support, but instead deliver something else that was also called PDF - something that really was nothing. It was funnier in my head, I guess - just like the voices.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
!/bin/bash
/dev/null "http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/results.aspx?&Q uery=opendocument+support"
while [ 1 ]; do
wget -O
sleep 1
done
Microsoft BOB?
Now not only do I have to cope with junior marketing coordinators thinking they are budding graphic designers with all of their Word or PowerPoint skills at their disposal...
...now I can look forward to my advertising clients retorting, "but I did send it in PDF! What more do you want?"
Forgive me if I'm not quivering in anticipation at all the crappy PDFs in RGB colourspace with non-embedded, TrueType fonts and 72 dpi images.. *sigh*
MFC is a set of C++ wrappers around Win32. They were NOT used in J++. J++ provided java wrappers (using Microsoft's Java-Native/C API named J/Direct) around Win32 and *NOT* around C++ classes. It's actually pretty hard to access C++ from Java (even with J/Direct). Microsoft did not expose MFC in J++.
It appears you are trying to access a function that is not installed. Install the sarcasm detector now? Please insert the Microsoft Office supplemental CD now.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Think about more of the new features...
o It'll need more time to load the Drivers. (remember the problems wiht Acrobat 6, which they solved in 7)
o It'll crash more often than before, another plugin too much
o You'll need a very heavy set PC, min 1G ram
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
I think you're being a bit overly critical here...
If PDF is royalty free, why not? Guaranteed WHYSIWYG, and todays printers of enough processing power on board to process PDF. I would certainly be interested.
hmm, PDF document format... isn't that the same as "portable document format document format"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It makes *NO* sense to mail MSWord documents except when *wanting them to be changed*, ie. shared writing or editing. Otherwise the document should be in some sort of secure format, even one as minimally secure as PDF. For the life of me, I can not understand why anyone would mail out sensitive information in a format that allows the recipient to easily and immediately change it to say whatever he wants.
Anyhoo, *PDF releases us from the MSWord noose* and that *is* important. It means much more acceptance for using other tools for generating documents.
I'll believe it when I see it, though. Microsoft *can not* afford to lose their iron grip over the Office market. They're going to fuxx0r PDF in some proprietary way, you just know it.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The reason is that it was not just one person but representatives of all the major players in IT including MS that came up with ODF. The alternative is for one player to dictate to everyone else including customers. There are really compelling reasons for adoption of internationally multilaterally agreed standards. ODF is in that category, your open image format would not be no matter how appropriate it was.
done it, including open and free tools, and has proven that it was useful, Microsoft decides to include PDF export in its coming Office suite. Talk about innovation. Same old, same old... :(
"Word template Expression of support to official"
Very good search engine! This is exactly what Microsoft should send to the State of Mass. regarding its OpenDocument standard.
Yeah, well, who won that legal battle? And Sun got almost everything they asked for out of it, too.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
For example, Word has internal and external links - those are supported by PDF. You don't get those features if you just treat PDF like a printer.
Yes, because its part of Mac OS X! The operating system supports it because everything in OSX is a pdf including the content on the screen. Microsoft didn't include PDF support, they just take advantage of a built in feature of the OS.
What I want to see next is Microsoft adding pdf support to Windows. I love to see Adobe lose money. Only people who need to use acrobat pro specific features will require Acrobat now. I get too many tech calls on pdf support at work. You have to cough up money each time a new version of Windows or office comes out to get acrobat to work correctly.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Who. Cares.
Believe it or not, it DOES actually matter when the most widespread operating system is perpetually five to ten years behind everyone else ... apart from the obvious economic implications in terms of business efficiency and productivity, there is also the issue of industry and technology stagnation and lack of innovation. These are not abstract religious ideals, they actually affect the country's wealth, GDP, productivity, and quality of lives of the people -- that is why people care. In fact the idea of saying "who cares" to such an obvious and real problem is simply, well, stupid.
please note it's viewing that's built in, MS is talking about PDF creation as well
This is 100% wrong. Either you are deliberately lying and spreading FUD, or you are a moron who does not do even the most basic research before posting.
As it happens Microsoft had a production 32-bit OS with full memory protection and preemption (NT 3.1) almost a decade before Apple did
When did Microsoft's first CONSUMER operating system with full 32-bit memory protection come out?2001 (and it was a god-awful security mess until SP2 came out in 2003). Mac OS X is a consumer OS, and NT was never, ever marketed to home users. The "best" thing Microsoft was pitching to home users at the time OS 10.0 came out was Windows Me!
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-1997/jw-1 2-volanomark-p2.html
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
NineNine is a Microsoft shill, that's why. The "other format" he is referring to, that he expects, is no doubt Microsoft Word.
*none* of the software industry is exactly a powerhouse of innovation
So your logic is that, since none of the industry is a "powerhouse" of innovation, that all of the companies must be equally innovative? That makes no sense - it's pretty clear that there are vastly different degrees of innovativeness.
Further, some companies appear to have an internal culture of innovation, while others appear to have an internal culture that deliberately avoids innovation in favour of purchasing and copying existing technologies from innovative companies.
And choosing innovative companies really DOES matter, "ranting" about innovation is not just ranting about some abstract 'religious' ideal --- innovation and competitiveness genuinely affect the economic productivity and the quality of lives of the millions of people that use the products. INNOVATION MATTERS.
Visual Basic was a highly innovative synthesis of things, but that's beside the point.
The problem is, all innovation builds on prior practice in some way. The Mac was practically stolen from Xerox, but most of the things in the Xerox Star were just pulled together from various research prototypes. The Web was preceded by 30 years of hypertext and networking systems. Sometimes things just take off at the right time.
So after you get done hyperventilating over this super-exciting "new" Microsoft innovation, why don't you read up on OS X and what it has done with PDF for the past five years? Quartz, also vector-based, is built on the PDF object graph, which is itself a subset of Postscript, and has allowed applications to save their contents to a PDF for years. It's one of the reasons OS X is so great with desktop publishing--what you see really is exactly what you'll get, down to the typography spacing, because the same graphics operations drawing the screen are also what get sent to the printer and what get saved to PDF.
Ok, when you get done oohing and ahhing OSX and its PDF and Quartz, maybe you might want to actually read about the WPF and XAML.
Since Postscript is a 1980s technology, I hope you surely wasn't meaning that as a compliment to OSX and its PDF usage.
Vector to Raster operations of a 3D space are really not even a part of the PDF/Postscript foundations in OSX. To get to real 3D Space in Quartz you drop to OpenGL. (Should I quote Apple on this for you, or do you know enough about Quartz?)
As for Avalon, it is like taking what Apple did with the PDF/Adobe style screen rendering and printing and jumping ahead 10years.
Quartz can be used to display great Vector and 3D graphics on the screen but aren't designed to work in the same context well together or be the actually framework of an application UI. It is there to display pictures and render images for applications, not to actually MAKE the UI of the application.
Additionally, the graphical support level between Quartz and Avalon are quite a few years apart. From the simple 3D UI design model for Avalon, i.e. every button has light source, depth, etc. In OSX, even the 'pretty things' are raster images.
In Avalon they are Vector images that have full preservation all the way to the screen, and aren't lost in rastering like in OSX.
For example, in Avalon you can truly zoom the screen to any resolution, and the UI can stay the same size in, and if Microsoft wants to do cute animations like the Genie Effect, it isn't a blocky raster image of the application, it would be a vector representation of the applicaiton, and not get blocky.
(Next time you genie a window, notice how jagged the image is coming up, and especially the edges.) Why? because OSX uses accelerated raster layers for this stuff, any original vector information has long been lost at this point in the drawing of the application. In Avalon, it isn't.
Now dig deeper into Avalon and you will see that it's XAML can represent multi layers of both raster and vector imaging, and do some pretty cool things in those layers. It can represent stuff in straight vector graphics (from blurring to alpha blends), that normally you only find in high end illustration applications.
Now compare this to a PDF file, which for advanced Vector graphics, it can't even natively represent, it has to rasterize them to a compressed JPEG to do a lot of cool effects, so all vecotr information is lost. In Avalon's XAML, it is not.
Avalon has a full 3D UI model, OSX can display 3D images, but no UI model built around it.
Imagine a floating cube, with a contact list on one side, and a button on the other, and a calendar on the other side. Now image it rotating slowly in from of a array of smoke and fog, that the cube even seems to be floating through. Now image the user clicking on the button or clicking on the contact list and typing a new contact while the cube is still spinning. Now imagine the user panning around the back side of the cube with a flick of the mouse and adding a date to the calendar, then imagine the user taking the cube and throwing it to the back of the screen to get it out of the way.
All in crisp vector representation and using nothing more than XAML. Show me where you can do that with Quartz even (without writing it in OpenGL), and also show me where you can use the Vector and PDF layers of OSX to draw this application, all vector based, a lot like a cool 3D video game.
Other than the off screen acceleration abilities in OSX, and OSX's support for PDF, it basically renders much like Windows' GDI system, which is being replaced by Avalon.
Wow, that was the most breathless shilling I have seen in a long time. So MS took SVG and did an embrace and extend and it's AWESOME!. Yea right.
Really, SVG has a full 3D model that can display both raster and vector in a 3D space and link back to actually represent the UI and process UI events?
Wow I didn't realize SVG was anything more than an XML Vector format.
Oh wait, that is all SVG is... I wonder why Microsoft just didn't use only SVG and limit the Windows display to 2D vectoring. Hmm...
Maybe because they were doing both vector and raster and providing UI support (not just displaying a picture), and also a fairly rich 3D environment as well, in addition to various forms of media support and other things that can be represented and classed out like INK.
Wow that could be it, since SVG only supports about 5% of what XAML does, do you think that is why Microsoft didn't just use SVG?
Nah, that would make sense - we can't have that on slashdot when Microsoft is concerned.
Speeding up Acrobat 6 by disabling (unneeded) plugins:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2005 5
http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/2347
It's also worth noting that when you start Acrobat/Acrobat Reader, by default it phones home to check for application and plugin updates. You can block the application from getting 'net access, but in comparison to the plugin issue, this delay is so minor, why bother worrying about it?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I bet Metro could pump out OpenDocument formatted files easily enough too. What benign motive do you think is preventing them from doing that?
None... They will probably pump out OpenDocument - Documents just fine...
Microsoft has no problem supporting OpenDocument, they just don't want to be limited by it, because OpenDocument will not go far enough for to establish standards for common things stored in documents today.
Microsoft is basically saying, ok if you want to standardize, the freaking do it all the way. Don't let the users lose INK, Sound, and other things that are stored in the document in a non-standard format. They are saying these concepts should be standardized further, so that a Document that has INK or more advanced Media stored in it, that it still should be open to be opened on more than just the application that created it and packaged up the extra pieces that there is no standard for and other programs won't be able to disply, hear, or reproduce.
Microsoft's top people screw up the terminology a bit, but go read what Microsoft really wants when it comes to a standard Document format.
For example, something more advanced that handles all this type of stuff like XAML would be closer to a better choice, and it may be Microsoft's presentation format and document, but is basically open to anyone. That is why people in the Beta group are already creating XAML based readers for *nix and OSX.
Bascially if OpenDocument did ENOUGH to support even the silly crap that can be stored in a 8yr old MS Word or WordPerfect Document, it would be a hell of a lot better than what it is now, since it doesn't provide enough standards to even do that properly. So how can you base an industry standard on this type of Docuemnt format?
Yeah, and MS Office still can't deal with long file names. Why don't we put Apple in charge of MS Office? Pretty quick, we'd catch up with Open Office.
Apple's Pages and Keynote use XML (this was a very pleasant surprise for me).
Gnumeric uses XML.
AbiWord uses XML.
The open document format that OpenOffice and KOffice use is XML.
The trouble is that it's not obvious. People assume they use crazy propietary formats. If it was easy to grab the source and apply an XSLT transform to get another format, why, you'd have the Universal XML viewer which could work with all those formats!
I don't know about MS Windows-land because I don't really use it that often.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
By crippled, I mean by the time Java 1.2 was out, Microsoft's JVM was never updated with the new classes. So it had less functionality.
Here is a hint, one is 1.3mb at minimum compressed, the other could be anywhere from 30kb to 1mb at the max.
Probably (A). You go and make the extra effort to compress the XML, why don't you compress the image ? Under most conditions (this is desktop, not live pictures - most of the screen is blue :-) ), even lossless compression of the bitmap would make it on the order of several dozens of KBs.
Your XAML OTOH would need to have some really funky encoding where most stuff is cut into raster bits that get encoded in an XML friendly way (i.e. very bloated) and some stuff which can be presented in vectors (what exactly ? I can't find anything on my desktop which was originally vector, especially if I exclude the content of application windows which are self drawn) which are still big as they are XML encoded. I would hazard an educated guess that apples to apples, your uncompressed XAML data is 2 to 3 times bigger then the uncompressed original image (after compression they might be on the same order of size) and takes between 5 to 10 times more processing power to parse and understand.
Like I said, completely useless except as hype pressure points ("we're better then linux because our display code is XML powered!").
Also included in this release is the MicroSoft Enterprise PDF reader (available seperately for $299.95) which is required to view PDF's created by the new MicroSoft Office 12. The Adobe version is incompatible with the innovative enhancements made to the format by MicroSoft.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Hmmm...
My guess would be that the Mass. OpenDocument format standard may have contributed to this.
Yes. This sure smells to me like a way to stay in the game with Mass. And after whining about how Adobe was allowed in (without mentioning the ISO starndard for pdf) now they leverage someone elses open standards format to get in the door - BUT ONLY IF ITS always ISO standard PDF and TWO WAY.
Bah.
If you buy the full version of Acrobat - not just the reader - you get a 'PDF printer' where anything you print to it gets converted to PDF. It even includes 'create PDF' menus that get added to all your MS Office apps. So this is MS just forking up the licencing fee and building it in.
Sure it's different from having it system level, but it has been availabe for years. You could take any postscript file and run it through Distiller since at least Acrobat 4.
Not as easy as OS X, but if you are serious about dealing with PDF's than you should have the full version of Acrobat anyway - which has the 'printer' included.
Im.
Ok, when you get done oohing and ahhing OSX and its PDF and Quartz, maybe you might want to actually read about the WPF and XAML.
I already have, kid.
Since Postscript is a 1980s technology, I hope you surely wasn't meaning that as a compliment to OSX and its PDF usage.
The age of a technology has nothing to do with its validity. Are you seriously suggesting we all dismiss something merely because its a "1980s technology?" I hate to break it to you, but so is Windows. This kind of uneducated statement could only spawn from someone who's listened to Microsoft marketing materials.
Vector to Raster operations of a 3D space are really not even a part of the PDF/Postscript foundations in OSX. To get to real 3D Space in Quartz you drop to OpenGL. (Should I quote Apple on this for you, or do you know enough about Quartz?)
Yes, Quartz lets you move to a real 3D API and not a bloated XML layer to Direct3D. What's your point? Maybe you haven't followed the discussions online about it, or the links I gave earlier, but Avalon is a catch-up technology to what Quartz has been doing for half a decade now. Maybe you're excited about all this stuff because you never looked at OS X before now, but this is nothing new.
As for Avalon, it is like taking what Apple did with the PDF/Adobe style screen rendering and printing and jumping ahead 10years.
After you get done hyperventilating, get back to me.
Quartz can be used to display great Vector and 3D graphics on the screen but aren't designed to work in the same context well together or be the actually framework of an application UI. It is there to display pictures and render images for applications, not to actually MAKE the UI of the application.
Actually claiming that Quartz isn't designed to be the framework of an application UI is completely bizarre and misinformed, given that, you know, all of OS X uses it. CoreGraphics is responsible for the "making" of the UI controls through vector operations. Later in your post, you claim Quartz doesn't natively support vectors, another bizarre assertation.
Additionally, the graphical support level between Quartz and Avalon are quite a few years apart. From the simple 3D UI design model for Avalon, i.e. every button has light source, depth, etc. In OSX, even the 'pretty things' are raster images.
Aqua is a very nice blend of vector/raster to allow for performance on older machines. I can't think of anything more wasteful than light sources and depth on 2D interface objects. Besides that, you can do all of that on OS X. You apparently believe because XAML is this crappy XML layer on top of Direct3D, that magically makes it superior in some way.
In Avalon they are Vector images that have full preservation all the way to the screen, and aren't lost in rastering like in OSX.
Again, Quartz already does full vector-based imaging. Many of Aqua's rendered controls are raster images for performance reasons, but you can resize the interface in OS X Tiger using the included developer tools, and the images will resize with them. Quartz already fully supports the ability to create resolutionj-independent vector-based controls. I don't know if you've done the "killall" trick on a window that's in the middle of the genie animation, but the controls actually continue to function in their warped state, registering clicks correctly because of the vector-based nature of Quartz.
For example, in Avalon you can truly zoom the screen to any resolution, and the UI can stay the same size in, and if Microsoft wants to do cute animations like the Genie Effect, it isn't a blocky raster image of the application, it would be a vector representation of the applicaiton, and not get blocky.
Quartz already supports this, and developers can enable it in Quartz Debugger to make sure their apps run correctly in resolution-independence (no doubt in preperation for OS X Leopard). Apple chose not to create everything
"Sufferin' succotash."
No, Microsoft does not want to lose whatever amount of control they think they have due to owning the de facto document standard. If you think that Microsoft is concerned about being limited, well they should be able to sleep at night when they consider that the OpenDocument format hit version 1.0 in May. They don't version it for nothing. So, expect improvements to address all of Microsoft's concerns. It is going to make more and more things real standards. Open ones. You can already save sound and video in documents and silly stuff like that. Please don't think that only Microsoft can implement a concept like INK either. XAML may be fine, but it has one thing about it that Microsoft wasn't willing to give up and Massachusetts wasn't willing to accept-Microsoft's control of it. Microsoft and Massachusetts both know what they were at odds about and any other issue Microsoft seemed put out about was a red herring.
FYI.. Kword imports PDF files, and allows you to edit them. At least as well as it imports word docs (not perfectly by long shot). However, there is still no export to either of those document types, which is my real reason for not using it more.
once more into the breach
There is a pint of beer sitting on my desk waiting for the first person who can name a reasonably successful product or technology - past or present - which Microsoft pioneered.
"Microsoft Basic" for various platforms of the time before DOS. Oh wait, never mind.
Dude, don't waste your time with that killjoe idiot. He's a overall linux apologist (and I put very little people in that category), and anything good you could possibly say about windows - even if it's insightful/true/funded and all - will make you a shill in his eyes. He's done some of the worst trolls I've seen here in YEARS, and lots of idiocies and uninformed opinions about everything he has no clue about. His opinion is biased at best (even "completely worthless" would still be an understatement), he thinks the ONLY solution is linux, that it's the answer to everything and son on.
Don't waste your time with him, he's not worth it.
I must admit, you are the first person I have ever known who has argued against loops in a language. While technically postscript doesn't guarantee termination of a print job, one assumes that the document creator does eventually want the document to finish printing. Infinite loop bugs in postscript documents tend to stick out for some strange reason and get fixed before release. Where the language doesn't guarantee completion, the programmer does.
And you are completely neglecting the other limited resources on a printer that loops are a great help for: RAM and bandwidth. A document effectively employing loops will generally print faster than one that doesn't because it takes less time to download to the printer and can retain more of the document at a time in memory.
This space intentionally left blank.
The PDF viewer manages to achieve device dependence on a device that isn't even in use (paper).
Wake up and smell the wood pulp. Many more people use computers to put stuff on paper than vice versa. Whether you think it's "upside down" or not, for most people, "digital" is a word meaning "not printed yet." The paperless office is something out of Star Trek. (And only Star Trek: The Next Generation at that.) It's not real, even if it is technologically feasible.
If anything, PDF is the best thing to happen to the idea of the Paperless Office. Because PDF at least carries the possibility that someone could say, "No, that's not what I want to print." As opposed to, "Print out a test copy and I'll see if it's what I want."
I was doing a group project once, and I was getting bored, so I was browsing around randomly on the computer's Start menu. I saw a strange program called Microsoft InfoPath. I opened it, not knowing what it would be. It provided templates for making invoices, receipts, and that sort of thing, which I promptly did. I charged one of my teammates $50 for something.
Anyway, this leads me to suspect that this is a high-tech form of sociopathy. Microsoft has created this program so that unwitting customers will accidentally make invoices to themselves, made payable to MSFT, while trying to type something. Sounds pretty sociopathic to me.
Indeed, Microsoft is the InfoPath for the digital age!
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
(cough) OpenOffice.org already has it (cough)
Microsoft has no problem supporting OpenDocument, they just don't want to be limited by it, because OpenDocument will not go far enough for to establish standards for common things stored in documents today.
Oh, for Christ's sake. Microsoft doesn't support OpenDocument, because it threatens reliance on the Office file format. OpenDocument is actually a superior format to Office. Heck, Office will never support XForms.
Microsoft is basically saying, ok if you want to standardize, the freaking do it all the way.
No, they're saying, "standardize on Office so our platform is maintained." You are such a shill.
Don't let the users lose INK, Sound, and other things that are stored in the document in a non-standard format. They are saying these concepts should be standardized further, so that a Document that has INK or more advanced Media stored in it, that it still should be open to be opened on more than just the application that created it and packaged up the extra pieces that there is no standard for and other programs won't be able to disply, hear, or reproduce.
OpenDocument can support any piece of media.
Microsoft's top people screw up the terminology a bit, but go read what Microsoft really wants when it comes to a standard Document format.
What Microsoft wants is for people to have to rely on Office because their documents are stored in a non-open, proprietary format.
Bascially if OpenDocument did ENOUGH to support even the silly crap that can be stored in a 8yr old MS Word or WordPerfect Document, it would be a hell of a lot better than what it is now, since it doesn't provide enough standards to even do that properly. So how can you base an industry standard on this type of Docuemnt format?
Except that OpenDocument does support everything in a Word/WordPerfect document. You're just shilling for Microsoft here, desperate for everyone to adopt Office and XAML formats to tie people to the Microsoft platform despite superior, open alternatives like OpenDocument.
Thankfully, OpenDocument is taking off, and Microsoft will lose this battle.
"Sufferin' succotash."
so...... has anyone sold their adobe stock? pdf export in office 12 will take a huge chunk of (existing and potential) customers away from adobe's grossly overpriced acrobat software.
That, of course is the innovator's dilemma in action. A relatively minor improvement in browser functionality, which Microsoft failed to exploit, has become a real opportunity for the competition. Witness not only gmail, but the slew of ajax word processors, calendars, websites... finally, the Netscape Halloween threat of browser-as-platform has been made reality. Oops.
Who let that one get out?
"Currently, on our OfficeOnline site, we are seeing over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support. That makes a pretty easy decision"
Quick, everybody search OfficeOnline using the word "Free".
If this is how Microsoft makes feature set decisions, let's play a trick on them! Get a bunch of people to runs scripts that search Office Online for "Office for Amiga" and see if they come out with an Amiga version!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Apple are not innovate with OSx and PDF / vector screen technolgy they inherited the technology when they acquired Next that used postscript to display the screen.
b rary/index.html;jsessionid=0FE102393BB2EE6D4FB30BF 3E38FEBAA
http://www.osdata.com/oses/next.htm i wish people would stop quotin apple or google as innovative - they may be better at getting things to market but they are not innovative.
Desktop search & indexing - shipped in Windows 2000 long before google...
Satellite mapping - terraserver setup in the nineties!
And why we are on the anti-rant here - why doesn everyone confuse open and free
PDF is a proprietary format it is not open, though it might be able to be licesed for free
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/li
make no mistake, those that have implemented PDF and haven't licensed it from PDF are in breach of IP. Just becasue adobe choose to do nothing about it doesn't mean the standard is 'open'
Wrong. From the OS X help:
To create a PDF file, choose Save as PDF. This creates a digital master PDF file. All graphics are at full resolution, and the file includes each font character it uses.
To create a smaller PDF file, choose Compress PDF. This compresses some images in the file, and produces a PDF file that may be smaller than a digital master PDF. It's especially useful if you need to email the file or if you don't plan to print the file.
To create an encrypted PDF file, choose Encrypt PDF and enter a password. Anyone who wants to open the PDF file will need to enter that password.
To create a PDF-X file, choose Save as PDF-X. PDF-X is a subset of PDF that's used in the printing industry and contains the minimum information needed to print the document.
And a vocal minority on /. complain about Microsoft bashing. A lot.
MS bashing on slashdot is often redundant, and that is it. It's not insightful to point out that Microsoft is being "bashed" here, there are cases against Microsoft that are not discussed in other places. The fact that you don't agree does not make it bashing.
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
Ooooh I can see you are close to orgasming over this extension of SVG so I will leave you to it.
evil is as evil does
Interpretation: buying out any of the companies that can ALREADY read PDFs and convert them to Word is too expensive. Or, interpret as: Microsoft engineering determines they can't do it because they lack the skills and/or knowledge and/or management and/or motivation to actually do it themselves.
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
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"VISTA" an acronym for the top five Windows problems: Viruses,Intrusions, Spyware, Trojans and Adware. -- Jim Lee Jr"
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"Veritable Incentive to Switch To Another operating system. -- Brian O'Connell"
Yeah, and linux has had it longer than that. What's your point?
I didn't forget about it - I was talking about creating Word files from PDF :)
"Office 12 to Include Native PDF Support!"
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
It's like a KDE:Plastik/OSX:Aqua hybrid! Awesome!
WOW! That's great news! I'm off to check and see if I have overlooked something. My view of Apple was changing for the worse with this little problem. It was *very* embarrassing being told that my PDF was incomplete. :(
:)
Thanx! I hope your right - or that it only works in Tiger (I'm on Panther) so that I'll *have* to upgrade!
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
I agree. He's a dumbass.
Thanx! I hope your right - or that it only works in Tiger (I'm on Panther) so that I'll *have* to upgrade! :)
:)
I think most of the PDF-X stuff was added in Tiger. At least you'll have an excuse for upgrading.
No, Microsoft does not want to lose whatever amount of control they think they have due to owning the de facto document standard.
You don't know this, it is nothing but your own assumptions.
My statements were based upon documents and consistency of Microsoft's position on this throughout the whole process.
Unless you are psychic and 'truly' know better than just assumption, go chase some time portal in your backyard.
I get so sick of people thinking they know what other people's motives are, and paint them with their own myopic brush of the world.
Everybody knows this. You can read about more here.
It's a shitty format if the goddamn player is horribly broken and bloated. Besides, what PDF's do, faxes have been doing better and easier for decades.
Everybody knows this. You can read about more here [wikipedia.org].
A lot of people beleve in the easter bunny too.
This is opinion and is NOT based on fact. To get fact, pull the document surrounding these matters, there are plenty of the on the Internet.
Don't rely on some opinion piece that has the nerve to 'denote' the hiding of file extensions as one of the 'big problems' with the spreding of viruses. (Other OSes hide or have no file extensions as well - where is their evil article?)
Give me a break...
Look, I know MS has a fine document standard they would like everyone to use because they put a lot of work into it, and that is okay. They are a business, and that's the way things work. Noone is going to be able to point somewhere where MS says they don't want to not be the de facto standard. If they say something like that, it means they aren't doing everything they can for their shareholders. But I don't believe for a minute that they won't support OpenDocument because they don't want to be limited by it. It was a negotiating tactic that Massachusetts evidently didn't find pursuasive either. It's too bad they didn't find a way to free up their standard enough to satisfy Massachusetts because they sure didn't get the outcome they wanted out of the situation.