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Unipage - A PDF Alternative?
A reader writes: "Unipage recently released a beta version of its Unipage Unifier.
The Unipage encoding is a way to encode a full page with its images, CSS, Javascript, Flash, and whatnot, into just one HTML file.
The 'Unipage Unifier' program instantly turns any online or local page into a 'Unipage' that can be viewed directly in a browser.
It saves the mess of files when you normally save a complete web page, but maybe the bigger scoop is that now people can use 'Unipages' to send content rich documents instead of PDF. But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page. Together with any program that can export into HTML you can get fully styled, dynamic, portable documents instantly.
And it's free." Good luck taking down the installed base of PDF.
No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. Lame.
- Support vector-based documents, allowing both text and graphics to scale to any size?
- Provide a way to cryptographicly sign a document?
- Attempt to tackle the "portable" in PDF? Are you kidding me? It looks like a Windows-only download.
- Support e-book DRM features?
- etc, etc...
Actually, nowhere on the product's website do they claim to be a "PDF killer". It just looks like an independent developer's attempt to make a cool little (beta) application. Interesting, but I'm left to wonder why I'm reading about this on the front page of Slashdot? Not to mention IE has this functionality for years.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Of course, had you bothered to research the subject, you'd know that PDF has supported animations and scripting with JavaScript within a document for many years now. I'm not saying the Unipage won't be useful thing. But to claim it's superior to PDF in areas where it's clearly not isn't going to help its cause. Not only that, but the two products have different goals anyway. PDF is, and I suspect will remain, the best way to send a document where the design and layout is important. It should render the same on all PDF viewers, and can contain richer formatting than can be expressed in HTML/CSS. A Unipage will probably be easier to author[1] than a complex PDF, but will only accurately preserve content, not formatting. Use whichever one is right for the task at hand. If anything, I'd say it's more of a rival to Word documents than PDFs.
[1] In fact, I suspect that will be its major selling point. Although you can do wonderful things with PDF, most people don't because a) they don't know about them, and b) the Adobe authoring tools are expensive, and hence not widespread.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Nothing really new and has nothing to do with PDF...
In Firefox, you can use Mozilla Archive Format extension, which can also save pages in Internet Explorer's MHTML format, to do the same thing.
Besides, as it is said in Wikipedia, the reason for PDF is to render exactly the same regardless of its origin or destination and they are most appropriately used to encode the exact look of a document in a device-independent way. Unipage suffers from the common problem of webpages rendering differently in different browsers.
I've been waiting a long time for this. It's about time.
...right. How is this good for printed material? What can this do as a LaTeX export format that PS or PDF can't, other than being more difficult to generate (in the case of LaTeX?)?
Cause you know, not all of us use PDFs to distribute snapshots of web pages. Really.
Adobe has recently released its Intelligent Document Platform which gives PDFs the ability to use javascript and imbed things within their PDFs, along with the ability to use submission and make PDFs dynamic on the web.
And considering that Adobe recently purchased Macromedia, its only a matter of time before they have flash embedded and working solidly in PDFs.
Unipage is already waaay behind (like Hemos said, they don't have the solid installbase), and will have to come up with something extremely impressive that Adobe won't be able to copy.
I see this as vaporware before it even comes to release 1.0.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Yeah, nice idea apart from the fact that this is nothing like PDF. PDFs are used because they're a non-editable, printable format that can guarantee its presentation on any platform. Unipage would be none of those things, so how can it possibly be a replacement for PDF in any way, shape or form? Oh wait, I get it now. This Slashvertisment brought to you by the makers of Unipage!
But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Viruses)
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It certainly sounds cool, but not a PDF killer.
Changa hates change.
Um it has never bothered me when i save a webpage completely that there is a directory for it? Exactly what purpose does this tool serve becuase I simply cannot figure out why anyone would seek it out
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
If theres only a windows version, and no source code, then its no better than acrobat. I was hoping this would be some kind of open standard.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
The purpose of this software seems to be only to save a complete webpage as-is, while PDF can be used for any type of document and its main purpose is to preserve the look and layout of the original.
There's already a perfectly good standard for this -- MIME-encapsulated HTML or MHTML. It also has the advantage of being implemented in that little browser with 85% marketshare, Internet Explorer.
The Mozilla bug for implementing this is 40873, not that voting for it seems to do any good (bug is still 'NEW' after almost 6 years).
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
It's already easy to embed things into a single file with Gecko-based browsers (e.g. SeaMonkey, Firefox, etc) - all you'd have to do is grab the data that makes up the various files in the page (images, swfs, etc) and use "data:" URLs. For an example of a page that already embeds some images directly into the HTML, view this page with a Gecko-based browser. If you look at the source, you'll see some images inlined right into the HTML. I'd imagine it would not be difficult to make an extension that does what Unipage is currently doing. If all the content is hosted on the same domain, you could probably do it almost trivially in the page itself with some XMLHttpRequests to fetch the contents of images and other objects and inline them into document.innerHTML before saving it to a file.
My server
You say that as if it were necessarily a good thing.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
One thing I like about pdf files is the open standards though maintained by Adobe. If this is not an open standard, which I think is not, its not better than many free but proprietary tools which can achieve same effect, more or less.
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
Just like with MP3, no matter how advanced your alternative is, the huge user base is going to be real hard to convert.
Wow, just write 'windows' instead.
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
Voting on Mozilla bugs never does anything. It's opium for the masses - it gives you the feeling that you can do something and make a difference, but it's really just a convenient way for the developers to channel user input into an area where it's easy to ignore.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
This format does not work correctly in the most popular browser on the Internet: IE 6.
Whether you like or hate IE 6 you can't deny it exists, it has the largest market share after all... Any Internet format that does not support it is doomed to familiar.
Maybe in a few years from IE 7 and FF control 90% of the market but today that is not the case (not even close).
And what happens when the person viewing the Unipage doesn't have the fonts installed that are specified in the Unipage, like because they're viewing on a different (eg. OS) platform than that used to create the Unipage? That's the original design goal of PDF ("Portable Document Format).
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When you have opted for a web host who charge you according to the bandwidth your webpage has used. then it becomes a big issue when some people hotlink to your images and other files thus taking a free ride piggybacking.
If what is said on the webpage is true then this is a step forward for people who want to conserve their bandwidth. But the big question is how it will affect (or not affect) the design of the site especially when using CSS and javascript.
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It's an interesting idea, but surely a more elegant solution would involve a cross-platform (eg. Java) front-end to files that are simply zipped, like a .jar
There is no need for a proprietary format or client to gain this functionality. After all, we're trying to get away from closed-source PDFs, right?
I'm sure next time I send something in pdf out to be printed, the print shop will respond with "hm, this is too postscripty, can't you lay it out in html?"
"It just looks like an independent developer's attempt to make a cool little (beta) application. Interesting, but I'm left to wonder why I'm reading about this on the front page of Slashdot?"
Because slashdot members hate all things business. We don't like Macromedia. We don't like Adobe. Etc, etc. Even the fact that it's called a "Killer" by the poster reenforces this.
"Yes sir, our program produces amazing pages!"
"Can I see them?"
"Yes sir, really, really amazing pages!"
"So could I see an example of-"
"Yes sir, really, really, really amazing pages!"
Wake me when the wizard steps out from behind the curtain.
Crow T. Trollbot
A more interactive version of PDF already exists in AMRITA:
http://www.amrita-cfd.org/cgi-bin/about
which is designed to make it easier to convey scientific results to the community.
Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page
Superior or different? This looks quite nice, but how can one compare this with PDF? This is just... something different.
PDF is a "portable document format". A way to port a (static) document so that it will be viewed and printed identically everywhere.
HTML is a way of describing documents so that they can be viewed and interacted with on a lot of platforms. It will NOT look the same on all platforms, it will NOT print well on all platforms (as a matter of fact, it will probably print very poorly on most platforms)
Different goals, different products. Why is that everyone wants the "do-it-all" product?
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Nice idea but , I only generate pdf's on the fly from a php script, not a big pdf user but i would need an php plugin library thingy as well. There missing a lot of the functions many of us take for granted, pdf is something i know users will have, and its easy to generate pdf code and present to a browser to handle. I'd rather not have to use microsoft windows to create documents from our website and then ftp/scp it back.
PDF is effectively worthless as a single page format... this is the webs domain.
The CSS committee has attempted to tackle pagination for ages... guess what... it doesn't work... it's aweful, it'll be years before it's even close to ok.
Let me point out that Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 4.X, Internet Explorer, etc... have supported this kind of functionality for ever... it's MIME embedding. I don't recall the exact syntax and it doesn't interest me enough to bother looking it up, but things like or (syntax is completely wrong, but the concept is there) have been around forever.
So, what's new about this? And more importantly, is someone just wasting my time by publishing a story about a program that just automates the process?
And in response to the earlier story from someone, last I checked SVG is a scalable format in web pages that theoretically is nearly identical to PDF. PDF is a path based renderer. By path based renderer, I mean that everything is based on (CreatePath, MoveTo, LineTo, ArcTo, ClosePath, FillPath) type operations. This is the mechanism that is adopted from PostScript (maybe some earlier technologies), SVG is based on the same idea.
If you read the FAQ, that's exactly what this does. It's a handy little tool for using that sort of encapsulation, and little else, it seems.
This has nothing that I can tell to do with PDF, either. Completely different target audience, completely different requirements, completely different format. If this format was "enough" to "beat" PDF, it'd already be beaten by Microsoft's MHTML format. But it's not. Because they're not the same.
This basically looks like a small tool to do something which is not entirely complicated, and the article is blowing it out of proportion to look like something it's not.
This begs the question - if the purpose is to excape a spawn of satan software like Adobe's PDF & its viewer, why create a format that can imbed web plugins, especially ones like flash?
If Unipage did replace PDF, we could expect a much worse time of things, when every Joe Average and business marketinghead in sundry attempts to embed Flash, Shockwave and Java into documents.
Now, I know this is Slashdot, but even here I'd expect a better effort than this FUD. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but anyway, you can both read and create PDFs using free (speech and beer) software, the very existence of which is possible because Adobe has kindly released the specs for PDF that are available to all without charge. Nor does Adobe charge for their own reader, although they do keep the source to themselves.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
PDF is an open standard as is, and certainly a good one, for a start. For saving documents (paper) in a way you can be guaranteed will render the same anywhere else. RTFA, and Unipage is entirely different and in no way competing project, revelant to saving webpages as "one-file", in an .mhtml way. Is that a common problem anyway?
But yes, even if misinformed, they aren't yet ready to take on Adobe Acrobat. from http://unipage.org/links.html
Links
Free software for creating dynamic web pages:
coming soon
Agreed. Upstarts like this NEED mac and linux versions more than most products do, because I feel like Mac and Linux users tend to be more willing to try products like this out.
the Mozilla Archive Format....
So let me get this straight: Including Flash, Javascript, animated GIFs, and other obnoxious content is now considered an improvement?
At least all the monkeys at MySpace will be pleased... now they can email seizure-inducing pages to each other without bothering to copy the link from their browser bar.
So much for the goodness of OpenSource software...
The MHTML incompatibility plus the inability to search correctly in multi framed pages (like Java documentation).
Firefox pwn3z
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
KDE Konqueror --> Web Archiver
.war extentsion (actually tar files)
Saves webpages with
I use this frequently to save pages before they vanish into nothingness,
I also email them to friends and family and they can view them on their machines
exactly as they originally appeared even if the original pages and or domain vaporize.
This has been in KDE for sometime now..
HA! When they make it so that I can open a 75MB 2000+ page long HTML document without it taking 6 hours and locking up my computer in the meantime, I will consider it. PDF is FAR superior in that aspect. I hate PDF's in general, but when it comes to making LARGE documents, nothing compares to PDF's ability to open and print them with ease. I seriously doubt this would compete on any level.
I think that PDFs aren't quite represented accurately in this information... however...
I think folks that try to innovate with new document formats and rich content (easily-distributable rich content, that is) should be lauded for trying to improve users' experiences. The concept sounds neat, especially if it can become as ubiquitously supported as PDF documents. I think it is fun to watch new technologies unfold - especially if they are intended to make things easier for Jane and Joe Doe.
My questions are: What about security? What about unkind things like Trojan code, malware, or other things that aren't about improving the users' experiences? Are these doc-u-application-web-page-rich-experience documents running in a strong enough sandbox?
A Passionate Independent Musician
Because the individual components haven't all been invented yet.
When you save a page from the net, it puts it all into one nice little file.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Idiot. Ghostscript
No, it doesn't.
Try getting a magazine to print a spread or ad from this.
Sorry folks, print media requires PDF-x1 standards and that won't be going away.
It was too long a fight to get away from INDesign/Quark specs and PDF is actually a nice format.
With that said, why the hell would I want to look at 2 software versions of an ad to approve it when I can see the exact PDF the printer will use?
The other thing I saw as a narrow viewpoint was this quote
Isn't Windows the only OS that requires the 'special' software to view PDF's?
Most major picks of Linux has 3 PDF viewers and Mac has Preview out of the box.
The only thing that Mac Preview (as of Panther) doesn't do is PDF watermarking (acrobat feature only - Like permissions in corporate Office 2003).
I think all Unipage was trying to do was get away from the PDF plugin annoyance.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Let's say I publish books and am looking to release e-book versions of my wit and wisdom. My top concern is that they shouldn't be mass-distributable, so I chuck the book down into 15 or 20 sections. In what format should the e-book be released for top security and flexibility? PDF? A bit clumsy these days, Acrobat a bit of a nightmare, not all my files are in Quark. What about Flashpaper? Yes, I know Adobe owns it now ... it's easier to export, my reader can still print it and more secure as it more difficult to hijack from an embedded web page. Isn't it? Now where the devil does Unipage get me that those two options don't? Flash and Acrobat allow functionality within their respective wrappers ... and are "secure". Any opinions on which of those two is most secure?
PDF belongs to adobe and to develop using it you have to pay them for their patents use. So if you want to distribute yourself some PDF that's OK but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money. And that's just leading to more and more lockin.
Utter rubbish. A number of different libraries capable of generating and working with PDF documents are available; for a free (as in beer and speech) Java one, look no further than Apache's own FOP.
Adobe's desktop applications (eg Distiller) are pay-for, yes, but there are no patents or other licensing issues; the PDF spec is freely available if you want to write your own implementation.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
New colorful carrying cases for PDAs! Yes folks, this must spell the end for supercomputers.
It can not even compare. the #1 use for PDF's here is the ability for management to sign the documents and send them upwards. We can do thousands of things with PDF that this looks like it cant not be done. There is no PHP module to create these as well as a myriad of other issues making it extremely far away from even approaching the useability of PDF.
Embedding Flash and JS is a negative as far as I am concerned. Last thing I need is a damned JS app buried in the document to try and contact a server to let the creator I opened the document.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Does the PDF standard belong to Adobe? - Yes, but they publish the standard in enough detail so that anyone can use it to read/write standard PDFs. See http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html
e s-pdf.txt
Do they charge for this, their patents pertaining to PDF, etc? - No, not as long as you're trying to be compliant with the PDF standard. See http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/adobe-ipr-draft-zill
Adobe could have created a proprietary format and tried to defend it via patents, but they haven't. They could have also tried to make money off of 3rd parties trying to create PDF reader/writers by charging for patent licenses, but they haven't.
This is the reason that the PDF format (and, by association, Adobe) is the leader in this area.
And Unipage, from what I can tell from the article, is not. Or it is only as safe as the reader software. It supports JavaScript, Flash and all this other crap that would easily make me wary of opening any unipage document. Plus isn't this more of a .doc killer than a pdf killer? The whole point of PDF is that it's portable, which does not mean it's portable to different architectures, it means it's portable to different methods of reproduction, and will look the same on whatever media it's viewed on. While this isn't very beneficial to those who read everything on a screen, it is beneficial to anyone who wants to ensure that their document looks right when they send it to the printers.
I also thought IE did this years ago with those MHT files (Web Archive) that nobody ever used...
All this does is replace the src="whatever.jpg" with src="data:{MIME-Encoded contents}". Why is this a multi-MB windows-only download when a simple script could accomplish the same? Also, this "PDF Killer" only supports Firefox (Not MSIE, the browser 95% of Windows users use). Yeah, the Adobe regime is terrified. "A known lack of support is in Internet Explorer versions 6 and below. If you encounter a problem in other browsers, please let us know." Heh.
I agree completely. I still hate PDF and all, but I don't want anything worse, and I generally think the more functionality, the slower it can be. I use Foxit Reader for PDF because Acrobat is garbage and always has been.
I have a fast computer and everything but before I ever hit 2GHz I always hated opening PDF and was afraid everytime I did that my computer would go mega slow. I still believe PDF is really pointless, especially when companies prefer to make a PDF document of something when they could just display it in HTML. It's much faster that way.
don't forget the openoffice PDF export and the PDF Creator virtual printer.
pdf creator is great when dealing with coputers loaded with different software than the location you need to print at.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Wasn't this an obvious thing to do, about 10 years ago? Wonder why it took so long.
PDF is free as in speech and beer. The specs are published and free and nobody has to pay Adobe to use it.
Fonts aren't free (few are freely given).
You might want to ask these companies how much they pay Adobe to create PDF tools ($0).
http://pdflib.com/
http://activepdf.com/
http://www.fastio.com/
http://www.openoffice.org/
If Adobe folds up tomorrow, PDF will survive.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
But found interesting the point of bandwidth theft there, as in you encode with this your web pages and will be no way to link individual images or files inside your webpages. Its true, you cant link from outside an image if is only found encoded in a bigger web page. But also the resulting HTML files should be bigger than transfering the html and images as usual, and there is no sharing of resources, or taking advantages of client cache, if all pages in a site have the same logo, design elements and so on, all must be transfered every time, that will mean more bandwidth both for site and for users. If this becomes a trend bandwidth will be more damaged than helped.
I'm seeing a lot of comments about how it's NOT a PDF killer, and i think you should consider deeply; Although printing is a large part of what makes PDF useful, it's dominance is mostly assured because it's ALSO the easiest way to share web pages -- which are increasingly the coin of information saving (and transferring) when someone wants to share information they found online. The only problem is, IE uses one way (MHTML), Safari another, Firefox another.. and the whole mess has never really been reliable (multiple folders, platform lock-in, to name two)
So even right now, as a highly technical guy, i'm using the print option in OSX to get PDF or using wget, neither of which lends it's self to easy quick saving of info for offline. JUST like some people mentioned above, it's dynamic code, it may not print right... but you WILL be able to view the stuff offline! it's not like the other options (save wget in it's bulk) can do that anyway.
This means finally, home users (if the delievered interface to use this is slick enough) will have a great reason to A) Be able to share and use web-pages off line as free as the sunlight and B) give people less of a reason to use PDF. Point B by itself ain't all bad - but it opens room to competitors building off this for sure!
yeah, i like it.
-jamesr (login fergotten, oops)
Why not have some pages *for* *download* so you can see how they are stored?
"PDF belongs to adobe and to develop using it you have to pay them for their patents use. So if you want to distribute yourself some PDF that's OK but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money."
Just in case the previous posters haven't sufficiently beaten you with your own club, I'll also point out pdfTeX, which is distributed as part of the major free TeX distributions.
You're so wrong on this that I printed your comment as a PDF in OS X just to spite you.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I just want a reader/writer that doesn't use the same amount of memory as Premier.
Now I'm going to have to block ".html" files in Outlook, thanks to IE running local files in the "Trusted" zone...
Gee, thanks...
Also, Evince will read both PDF and PostScript documents, and of course OpenOffice can export documents as PDFs.
HTML is for displaying content regardless of how it appears, in whatever the best format is for a program that is browsing the web.
PDF is for making a file that creates a copy of a printed page. Very useful for some things, completely inappropriate for others.
I would be very interested in this as I always avoid clicking on PDF links on the web. I hate waiting for Acrobat to load. It woule be nice to have the browser itself take care of viewing.
Are there any good FREEEEEEE alternatives (that are quick to load) to Adobe's product that anyone could recommend. I have searched, but find that most of it is not free, and there is no way I could convince the office to purchase new software.
Yup, Ghostscript is very handy. On Windows, CutePDF and PDF Creator both wrap the Ghostscript engine in a friendly-to-non-techies UI.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
This sounds very similar to the mht file-type introduced by Microsoft in products like Internet Explorer and Publisher.
Um, yeah. Look up Internet Explorer's "Save as mail archive."
If you're on windows right now, you already have this functionality. The mail archives, "MHT" files can be viewed in IE or saved again as "HTML complete" and viewed in firefox, or any other browser if you want. Just MEME encoding of all the content (not flash, though).
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A gzip'ed tarball should be compatible long into the future. What format does Safari use?
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
IE has been saving web pages in MHT files for quite a while. Using MIME parts to point the content, you can still have all the files in a single page.
Its free and also relatively simple to code yourself.
Stay tuned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
Has everyone forgotten that the purpose of html is that the pages look different on different devices? The idea being that the information is what's important and the device should know how to best present it (given sufficient metadata). This is the exact opposite of the purpose of pdf, which looks the same no matter what. Of course some data could benefit from having part shown always the same and other parts shown according to device, and that's what this may do.
PDF is intended to replace postscript. You use it to save a document exactly as it would appear printed.
IE can already save a web page as a single file. It makes pretty good use of existing standards, mime encoding the page like an email with image attachments.
Wow, does that mean that it will hang my browser less than Acrobat does? Or crash less? Not just on one system, but on my home boxes, work systems, etc.
Isn't DjVu (http://www.djvuzone.org/) supposed to be an open source replacement for PDF already?
A fellow opera user coded a nice little PHP script to create a single file from any webpage using the same pinciple. here original post here
For more see:
Unipage is a PDF killer in the same way that oranges are the next apple killer.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I work at a newspaper. PDF is our standard for archiving any editorial, advertorial and copies of our entire paper. It's an integral part of our workflow. I don't know of any newspaper or magazine that DOESN'T use PDF. I'd say it's almost impossible for an alternative format to take over PDF, at least in the print media market. We've had enough trouble with OpenType support on our systems :)
P.S. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.
You mean people will be able to stick singing dancing pop up (or even pop under) advertising in documents. No thanks!
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
It can even be scripted. PDF::API2 with Perl is fantastic. I'm developing under it.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Why is that everyone wants the "do-it-all" product?
Its not that. The problem is that neither format is right for what people want out of a document format: editability and universal layout. HTML is easy to edit, but looks different depending on what you use to view it.
PDF, on the other hand, looks the same but isn't easy to edit.
Of course, this solution provides nothing new. You can encode images, flash files, etc. directly into the page as javascript variables that can be read by Mozilla-based browsers. Microsoft has a compressed html format that can handle almost anything, though not as much as the Mozilla browsers. I'd be very interested in seeing if they've found a way around Microsoft's limitation.
Anyway, if you're willing to limit everyone to using only one application for viewing (which is what you're doing if you're making everyone use this program to view) then its rather trivial to make this happen. I personally wrote something that did that for fun; it took me 15 hours because I also added public key encryption.
You can just tell everyone to use Firefox or just IE, depending on your preference.
This solution still doesn't add the pieces that are missing from HTML to make it work with printing. There is no way to specify headers, footers, widow or orphan rules, forced pagebreaks, or odd/even margins (well...outside of doing horribly intrusive things to the browser). I could care less if everything is one file or not. I use PDF writers because I can get this stuff in a ubiquitous format.
So where will we get an easily editable document format that we can use for printing? My money is on the OASIS open document format. Either that, or somebody finally implementing those things as part of CSS.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I think all Unipage was trying to do was get away from the PDF plugin annoyance.
Just for the record, in 2006 here are things that web developers should NOT do anymore.
Open up links in new windows, unless its for a reason. The only reason I can think of is when sites like CNN open up external links to indicate that you are leaving their domain, and they are not responsible for the external site's content or whatnot. (Its still annoying, but it has a valid reason).
NEVER, EVER, use plugins. EVER!
All content like PDFs and Java JAR files, should have a mime type to just download the file for offline viewing. The same with flash, or the new plugin of the week.
Am I the only person who uses the web and downloads files? Am I the only person on the web who knows how to open up a link in a new window or tab? I find some websites just to be annoying to navigate. I can't figure out their rhyme or reason for opening up in a new window or not (sometimes it appears random), and I can't figure out to close the window to go back to the previous page or to hit the back button. Less is more.
Really? I'd be interested in how you can do this in HTML. Note that although the link is a JPG, in the PDF format, it's all vector, no raster. When you zoom in the PDF document, the fonts remain crisp and sharp
I'm looking for a Windows driver that will capture my GDI calls and render to HTML. Any suggestions?
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
I think the poster was thinking more along these lines.
The problem is that neither format is right for what people want out of a document format: editability and universal layout. HTML is easy to edit, but looks different depending on what you use to view it. PDF, on the other hand, looks the same but isn't easy to edit.
.DOC.
PDF isn't supposed to be easily editable, and that's the point. If you're going to easy editability, a Microsoft Office format is pretty much the standard. If you're saving something in a PDF, it's to make sure the person you are sending it to sees precisely what you saw. It can't be changed easily, and it won't be rendered differently if it's opened in a different program.
Yeah, a do-all format should be easily edited and universally standard. But sometimes the do-all product isn't the best. If I send a file in PDF, it's in PDF for a reason. If I just wanted to make sure it was readable, I'd send it as
Computers need to explode more often.
The graphics architecture in Mac OS X is built on the PDF spec. Not one penny goes to Adobe when you click on the "Save as PDF" button in the print dialog. Nor does one penny go to Adobe when you use Preview to view a PDF or Postscript file.
And that doesn't count the mentions in other replies of Ghostscript and OpenOffice.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
The portable document format was really established to facilitate the paper-less office, by taking content that normally would be printed (like word documents or spreadsheets) and turn them into an electronic version that is standardized across multiple platforms. Eventually, manufactures realized that instead of the wasted expense and resources of printing brochures and manuals on paper, they published these documents in electronic form as a PDF and distributed them online or on installation CD's.
I would hardly consider PDF to be a content distribution mechanism for web pages. Most HTML based web pages print horribly and usually require a stripped down simpler version of them, or an actual PDF version.
Unipage sounds like it has its merits, condensing a web page into a single element instead of a file linked to other sources and files. But Unipage and PDF are mostly mutually exclusive document formats.
I can easily see unipage become the standard for distributing dynamic content. "Hey, have you seen this website?". Instead of linking to a website whose content has either already changed, or the page is no longer available, sending the content as a single file would be more ideal then linking to web content. It certainly would be beneficial for Slashdot to implement this technology rather then linking to servers that can't handle the slashdot effect and effectively having dead links everywhere.
But, for printed material, PDF is still king and it was never intended to distribute dynamic content. I doubt there is any real ability for unipage to be used as a printed document format, only if the content provider carefully constructed their HTML page to print nicely.
I like the idea of Unipage, but it is hardly a PDF killer. Both are intended for entirely different worlds, one of dynamic online content, the other for printed materials.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
PDF is built into OS X... Preview is just a handy little program to display them. That means that EVERY app on OS X can easily open, view and create PDF documents. There are PDF libraries for Linux too. Windows is just caught in the stone age.
Have you read <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question #Modern_usage>?
Natural, live languages are not spec'ed and frozen, and the meaninings of words and expressions change. That is how they work. Of course, some of that change is due to mistakes (for example, ignorance of that "begging the question" originally meant, and taking a slightly immaginative semi-literal interpretation) but that is not bad. English itself can be described as the result of a long long list of spelling, pronounciation, morphological and grammatical errors and deviations.
...just make a plugin that opens HTML files dynamically in RAR archives or something.
Imagine a small web site in one file with text and jpgs for interoperability.
I would be a little concerned about the IE model of "Security Zones" for this though. Dropping it on the drive and have the JS, Flash, Java, etc. run as local user with rights to read/write to the HD would make me a little nervous.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There's something that people forget about PDF. The companies that actually purchase seats of Acrobat use the format for reasons very different than what end users use them for. It makes an easy platform to distribute files for markup/editing/reviewing. The file size is very small and it works hand in hand with other Adobe products, such as FrameMaker, which is an industry standard (I'm in the tech writing field). While I used to absolutely despise the PDF format, it's matured so much over the past few years that I consider it an indispensable tool for my job at this point, if for no other reason than the fact than I can PDF thousands of sheets of engineering drawings and use PDF to search for cable numbers, key terms, etc. PDF has changed how I do my job and cut my research time in half.
For nonpaying PDF users, however, this new format is great. It will be an easy to use way to send resumes, papers, etc. to anyone on any platform with no worries about what software they may or may not have installed.
In short, different products for different uses by different audiences. Although, if it eventually matures to the level of Acrobat, I love competition.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Let's not forget that PDF is a Federal Information Processing Standard (aka FIPS). Adobe is required to provide free PDF readers and to provide open format specifications as a condition of remaining part of FIPS.
Thanks for the Krazy Kat link! One of the greatests cartoons ever.
Now we can package annoying straight into our pages!
MHTML Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=212&application=firefox
Please though we need a PDF killer i don't think that Unipage will do it, To easy to exploit.
IMO" PDF Has always been an anoying propritary format that requires downloading of new versions often and takes up gobs of extra memory as well as startup time.
If adobe could address though issues and make it universial PDF would be a great format but sadly they won't and PDF won't be a true universal format able to launch in any other way than with it's own propriatary software.
I hate having to download a PDF to view documentation on a piece of hardware or new software and have it load in a propriatary program that doesn't always exit gracefully and uses to much memory. Why can't some companies just put their manuals in HTML, Doc or Txt files or almost any other format that is universal to windows Linux or mac instead of PDF*inf' F that requires extra software downloaded and updated on a constain basis.
End PDF Rant*
Sorry i have just gotten to really hate the guts out of PDF over the years and just wish it would die but i don't think Unipage is going to do it not without introducing flaws and exploits in HTML and the other newer formats unless it removes or restricts in every way the vunerabilities in thoughs formats which i don't see likely without backpeddling a decade or so to reinvent the web with the security it should have had to start with.
So PDF a neccicary evil that shouldn't be but is and Unipage a good that cannot be without rewritting internet history to make it what it should be. But then many points in history or development should have been written differently to be what they should have been but won't be so were pretty much stuck were we are till the next real revalution comes along and we can only hope it will fix the problems of today without making more problems for tommarrow like PDF and other advances have done today.
But that's just My oppinion though and who really cares about that:D
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
So if you can embed all these things into this file then what's to stop someone from maliciously embedding code into the file to install spy ware? Viruses? You're taking a relatively dynamic platform and making it even easier to distribute world wide. Most emails are HTML based and allow HTML attachments...most end users at an enterprise levels don't understand what they're doing when they get these HTML emails. All it takes is for one spammer to attach these HTML files to their emails, and have an end user execute the attachment. Now he's the king of two industries, spam & malware.
This raises a question I've been asking for a while: Do we need an alternative to PDF? Or do we need an alternative to Acrobat? I would love to see an open source alternative to Acrobat Pro; Foxit Reader is great as freeware goes (once you get rid of the advertisement), but it can't do everything Acrobat Pro can, such as rearranging/deleting/adding pages. Plus it's definitely not as good at copying text. The same applies to GPL PDF-readers on Linux, such as xpdf.
Unfortunately, it seems there aren't any open source developers interested in making an alternative to Acrobat Pro. All too many are apparently more interested in making alternatives to open source software that already exists and does a fine job, such as new media players and text editors.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
A list of software and websites to Convert to PDF for free.
Maybe its just me, but I want data files to be data, not executable.
This is the main reason I disable javascript in acrobat or use alternative pdf readers.
I think it would be better if it didn't support active stuff.
No im the King of Spalware you will all bow before my throne or i will spal you into obivion muhahahaha!
It's good to be the king! 'Mell brookes history of the world part one'
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
Yes, I know, but what % of Firefox users have this installed? Things relating to file-format compatibility really need to be part of the base package, not an extention.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I remember doing an infokiosk project - alone - in a VERY short ammount of time (from zero to stand-alone touch screen app in 5 days). One of the functions was to have the kiosk print a half page on a standard HP printer. The page had a complex graphic layout designed as an EPS, needed to insert a picture taken by the webcam and print it along with other info. My solution was to have the infokiosk app (a flash player stand-alone, talking to an apache/mysql/php backend - I said this was done FAST) generate a PDF using some not-too-well-known pure PHP PDF library and print it out via a adobe reader command line command. Was it elegant? No. Was it the best solution I could come up with in the one evening I had to get printing done and working? Yep.
Without PDF's openness, there is no way I could've done it, especially in that time-frame.
But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page.
You may as well say Unipages are superior to PDF because you can embed viruses within the document.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I suppose that the scaling of the "Unipages" wouldn't work as well as PDF.
Couple that with the fact that not all html looks the same on all browsers.
If Unipage could convert the html to PDF that would be perfect, A nice easy to create PDF generator. But we would lose the javascript and flash functionality. I wouldn't want that in a static document anyway.
I agree -- an open source Acrobat replacement would be great.
I can't come up with any sort of burning hatred of PDF, as some people seem able to. Sure, back in the day, when I had a computer with 32 or 64MB of RAM, opening one by accident really sucked. Up until I figured out that there were better things than Adobe Acrobat Reader, it was still really annoying. But after Apple built PDF creation and reading into Mac OS, a lot of my dislike faded. I didn't hate the format, I just hated the reader.
So similarly, I wonder if there were better creation/editing/management tools other than Adobe's, if people would have less objections to it, and might not keep going down the blind alley of finding PDF alternatives?
After all, there is a PDF alternative, it's called DVI. In fact I think it predates PDF. But it's installed base is pretty close to zero (it's mostly only used by people who have LaTeX on Linux installed, and who for some reason aren't outputting directly to PDF). So it's not as though there aren't any alternatives. It's just that those alternatives don't really offer any compelling reasons to switch from PDF.
This Unipage business seems as though it's just a standardized web archive format, which makes me immediately wonder why they didn't just use one of the existing archive formats. (e.g., the Mac OS / Safari archive, or the Konqueror ".war" file.) Just on first glance it seems as though it's a reinvention of the wheel, although this time with the "ability" to encapsulate Flash, which is a malfeature in my opinion.
Anyway, PDF is here and it's here to stay -- it's been built into a lot of standalone devices (document scanners, fax systems) and I can't imagine that the format is really much of a moving target anymore, at least in its more basic implementations. But you're absolutely right: there is for some reason an odd shortage of FOSS manipulation tools for dealing with PDFs, at least that I've used so far.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
PDF is usually used as an electronic equivalent of giving someone a paper document. Just like a printout, it's not easily editable. That doesn't mean it can't be marked up or commented, stamped or signed, but you can't easily change what's written on the page.
That's a feature, not a limitation. There are enough 'editing' formats out there -- when somebody sends something out as PDF, it's usually because they are at the stage in paper-document process where they'd normally be printing it out and handing it around, either with a red pencil to mark up or with a pen to sign (or just for reading).
MS Word "doc" and hopefully in the future, OpenOffice files will provide the editing formats. But there will still be a demand for an 'electronic paper' format where you can only write on the document, not change it substantially, and where it looks the same to everyone.
Unfortunately, while there are alternatives to Adobe's software for viewing and creating now, the markup and signing/verification market is still basically dominated by them. I'd love to see some free tools for doing stuff like commenting, reviewing, and signing. I think the FOSS community would do better to concentrate on this, than put a lot of effort into developing new distribution formats that will probably never catch on.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You can do that with the base64 URL scheme. See here.
./ed so I couldn't check...
It is supported by Firefox already. Is that what they use? Site is
Ultra PDF is way to encapsilate any content that can be displayed in a browser(ussually IE) even PDF's. It has the ussual limitations like being Windows only a poor compression (if any).
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Amen, brother.
I still run across a few sites a day that have links set to open in new windows. It's obnoxious; if I want the link to open in a new window, I'll open it in a new window. It takes a right-click and about an eighth-inch slide of my mouse cursor to do it.
I browse with sounds, animations, Flash, and JS disabled, so the other part of your comment doesn't really apply to me very much, but as a general rule I find anything designers do that prevents me from using curl to grab the content obnoxious, and less likely that I'll actually view it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Ghostscript is great except it creates PDFs which are 2-3 times the size of what Adobe creates (5-10 times the size if you've got a lot graphics). This isn't good if you're planning on distributing documents online. For a non-windows solution, we had to pay big bucks for software from pdflib.com. They are the worst people in the world to deal with, but there isn't anything you can do b/c they're the only game in town.
So you're the one writting all thoughs anoying PDF's that litter my system!
Shame on you you're family you're family history and genetic line from start to finish despite you're good intentions you have still made my life all the harder so i anoint you with the spalware seal of disaproval.
Long may you and you're decendants reign and spal the world. King of spalware decree.
Disclaimer the King is drunk anything an enything said cannot be held against him in any court in any land as he has already paid them off in large advance so they won't even listen to you.
Disclaimer of disclaimer the disclaimer is a joke on a joke so disreguard the whole joke entirely or expose yourself as an anial retentive moron (who came up with that term and exactly what did they derive thart term for to begin with) with no sense of humor whatsoever.
Disclaimer of dislaimer's disclaimer No moron's or jokes nor king's were unduely harmed in almost any way during the production of this post so no proper lawsuit's unless bribed by public officials maybe brought. Though that are brought by public officials will be counter bribed for ten times or more the amount of the orriginal bribe (remember you're going up against a king of spalware here he has almost total unlimited income to rival Bill gates so it's pointless to fight him muhahahaha).
Real disclaimer this post is all a joke anybody thart took it or any part of it seriously is in need of a real life as well as a life altering experience so please seek one out imeadeatly instead of responding to this post.
Live log's and proper 'vulcan pun' What do you expect their vulcans humor is alien to them after all.
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
Because this traverses whole HTML file and associates and converts everything external in it to data:
I tried making this in javascript, basing on the old good Hixie's data: URI kitchen rewritten in js, but sorry, stumbled against a hard block - you can't automatically import -contents- of an image or external script or stylesheet into a JS object which you could transform later. Of course you can do var pic=new Image() but then you can do really little with the contents - there is no way to access the raw binary of the image to process it. So in fact you need a HTML, CSS (and possibly JS too) parser that will download all external files, parse them to find any further references (background-image: url(http://.../ in external style sheet?) and recursively replace all with respective data: URIs.
In the short half-hour before I gave up on my little converter, I pondered this thoroughly and the idea is way harder to do than it looks. Generally you need a good spider backend for seeking whatever needs to be inlined, then imports it in parseable way, starting from deepest nesting - and that's the hard part - the actual conversion is trivial.
Short list of things to consider:
-script src=..
--inside script: object.src=...
-link rel= (stylesheet)
--inside stylesheet: background-image:url(...);
-object, embed, applet
--their respective prerequisites?? flash loaded from inside flash?
-any element with background="..."
-any element with longdesc="..."
-img
-input type=image
-frame
-iframe
-any HTML, script and style already embedded as data: URI needs to be decoded first to see if it doesn't contain unencapsulated URLs as well.
Quite a few of the above need to be re-parsed for deeper linkage too. Likely there are some more I missed too.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
A nice easy to create PDF generator.
You can do this with any web browser. Or at least I can -- File:Print:Save as PDF. This is on Mac OS X. The generated PDF looks exactly like the page would if it was printed from that browser. (So one that you print/export from Firefox might look slightly different than one you export from Safari.)
I've never had reason to try it, but I'm sure there are similar things on Linux. In fact there's probably some slick way there to write a script or small program that would render the HTML page and then export it to a PDF, using the rendering libraries from Gecko or Konqueror and the pdf libraries. I don't know how one interacts with those libaries, or what commandline HTML rendering and PDF creation tools exist, but maybe it could be done just through a shell script.
And it was pointed out to me not long ago that there is a free printer driver for Windows that gives all applications PDF export capabilities, similar in usage Mac OS X's.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think this is a solution looking for a problem.
I've never run into anyone that really wanted to send a document that included an embedded applet. Maybe there's a demand for it somewhere, but I've never gotten close.
I do know that people want to be able to send "electronic paper" documents to each other all the time -- they want to get it looking just so, and then freeze it in place so that its appearance doesn't change and send it out to a dozen people for markup or approval. Ideally, people on the receiving end wouldn't be able to alter the actual document's text at all, they'd be able to comment/sign it, or visibly mark up an overlay (like an alpha layer) which could then be sent back to the document's creator, combined with other people's markups, and used in further editing.
I just don't see the market scrambling for an e-document format that lets them embed JS applets, especially when a crummy implementation of that technology could quickly become an annoyance and/or security risk.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Or you can use HTML and embed everything using data: URLs - RFC 2397
Let me tell you something, that word makes some kind of sense when relating to webpages, but it is an absolutely stupid word, esp. in this context.
I have floppies dating back to the early 80s that contain 'rich content';, ie, data and functionality. Never mind that normally we call the functionality an application or a program..
The second option is the ONE AND ONLY reason why my customers accept getting receipts and the like as pdf files. They can be reasonably sure that 1. I published it, and 2. it wasn't modified on the way.
I don't see how this Unipage is going to replace PDF because of this. This is completely seperate from the fact that Unipage is a usefull idea, and that I may use it as such.
That's what it sounds like to me!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I can see it now. Unipages with virii in them. If you can stick code in them, you've got a medium for virii. Just like M$ Word.
Corollary: Use basic HTML for navigation menus.
That means, no flash and if you want to use javascript then make sure that it works without it. I, for one, middle click on any links that I want to visit, then close the current tab and look at each in turn. It's a lot more convienant than hitting "Back" every page. But with flash this doesn't work (and I care far less about the links sliding in from the side when I load the page than I do about actually using them). Also, if you solely rely on a plugin for navigation, what happens when people don't have that plugin? I use BeOS as my primary OS and guess which popular browser plugins are not availible for it? (BTW, a lot of people also disable those plugins or don't have them installed.)
With javascript use something like: href="blah.html" target="_blank" onclick="window.open(); return: false;". Don't use: href="#" onclick=... or href="javascript:window.open(). (My HTML/JS might be a bit rusty, but you get the idea.) Nothing is more annoying (or confusing the first time it happens) then middle clicking five links and opening the same page or blank pages five times.
Yup, just what I also thought. It's actually one of the very few functions in IE that is miles ahead of Mozilla - and it shouldn't even be hard to implement!
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Yeah, I'm with you.
There are a lot of obnoxious document formats out there, not the least of which is the ubiquitous DOC, but PDF really isn't bad. At least the basic specifications are open, there are a bunch of Free implementations, and there's a free (beer) reference implementation in the form of Adobe's Reader to compare against.
As I've said in a few other posts now, it's really only the signing/markup/commenting software that's in short supply, if you're not willing to shell out for Adobe's gear.
To be perfectly honest, if someone is just sending me a document to read or review, that I don't need to actually edit, I would MUCH prefer that they sent me a PDF then to send me a MS Word DOC.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This at least covers the first little bit of what you stated. I've gotten much comfortable using the PS format instead of PDF. At my university, they use PS more often than PDF.
Yes, it does. As we are not talking about the formal study of argumentation here, "to beg the question" means exactly the same thing as "to raise the question".
Le français vous intéresse?
Someone posted this months ago, and it tells how to gut-out a lot of the add-ins that make acrobat so slow to open. You lose some functionality, but much of it is un-needed while viewing pdfs on the web.
How to use liposuction to repair Adobe Reader 6
I couldn't believe the difference it made.
This is the multimedia, arty, entertainment side of the internet, not the informative - where Flash indeed can be a pain. Now if the Internet is a democracy there should at least be room for modern art.
Gotta wonder, with all that added in 'functionality' for flash/java/etc how long until someone finds an easy way of making malicious unipage files?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If Adobe folds up tomorrow...
Well, we can always hope it will. (Fold tomorrow.)
Adobe has gone from being a technology driven company that does interesting creative things, to a marketing driven company that slowly pares back functionality in its Acrobat products and charges you more for the privilege. For example, in Acrobat 5 I could create form elements and paid around $200 for Acrobat. Now in Acrobat 7 I have to buy the "Professional" version to get that, and it costs $400. All while the program becomes a slow, bloated, usabilty and stability disaster.
Adobe has even sold out so far that it puts a Yahoo! advertisement in the toolbar of its Acrobat products! Holy crap!? A Yahoo! advertisement? WTF!?
Don't get me started on the ineptitude of some of the interface changes, like the obnoxious, moronic, anti-usability search functions or crap Adobe has shoved in to painfully constrained sidebars. I say don't get me started on those because all I really want is for the program to work, as quickly as possible (so I don't have to interact with it even longer), but Acrobat fails here too.
PDF may be an "open standard," in that anyone can create a compliant PDF, but for some reason there do not appear to be any programs that can modify PDFs the ways Acrobat can. So I have to keep using this stinking pile crap.
PDF is supposed to be an open standard. Why hasn't anyone developed an alternative to Acrobat -- either open source or commercial?
If you're using Windows, download and install PDFCreator. It'll let you print as PDF from any application ala Acrobat, but free. If you're talking about a scriptable way of doing this, use html2ps and then run ps2pdf from the ghostscript package.
Thank god.
I don't believe that's well supported though? About a year ago I tried to do it and found that in IE I could write images dynamically in Javascript (similar in idea to firefox's canvas).
Is this an article, an announcement of something new, or just a breathless Press Release from the creator being quoted?
(and unlike the data:// url there's no need to base64 everything... it just looks like an http stream)
This doesn't seem to be anything like Acrobat - It's more like the web-archive function IE used to have (or still has, I don't know). I seem to recal before the days of the WWW, There was Acrobat, and I think it was called Common Ground. I think Common Ground beat the pants off of Acrobat, but the IRS started using Acrobat for the tax forms, and Acrobat had a DOS reader, and I don't think Common Ground did. Anyway, what ever happend to Common Ground??????
change it.
CSS 2.0 supports both widow- and orphan- control with the "widows" and "orphans" block-level tags, respectively. Unfortunately, Opera is the only browser I've found that honors those tags. CSS still offers no page margin control, though.
I did have a quick (teeeeeny) search once, but didn't come up with anything? KPDF seems quite fast on my laptop, but is there a faster one for Windows than the Adobe one? It really seems quite retarded it takes such a long time to load up just to view some fonts and pictures? Maybe I'm missing something, but usually that's waht PDFs are?
PDF is a "portable document format". A way to port a (static) document so that it will be viewed and printed identically everywhere
Yea, that was the start but Adobe moved into the realm of html-form-like functionalty and other dynamic behavior that has gone way beyond the original spec. And this stuff has been out for several years. And then, all you have to do is cry "security! security!" and suddenly everyone is upgrading to the latest version of Acrobat Reader to support all your new flashy features! oye!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
openoffice pdf export in my version at work (I guess 1.1.1 for linux but I don't know by heart) manages to screw up pdf output every now and then, overlapping letters, etc. Solution: print to file, it creates a PS file, then just ps2pdf and voila, a correct pdf output of the file.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
i agree - people are almost proud that they view websites "without flash and wihout sounds" - Flash is an amazing tool for programming and creativity; just because nerds like jakob nielsen whine on and on about how bad flash is, it doesn't mean there aren't people out there making elegant, useable, interesting and (most importantly) CREATIVE and FUN website experiences with Flash and other multi-media tools
- they're trying to ship a copy of their dead-tree brochures
- they want to send an exactly-formatted hard-to-modify document so the readers just read it and don't do anything interesting with it, or
- they've written a paper for a dead-tree publication, where PDF makes sense, and don't want to take the time to reformat it for web pages (which can often be a lot of work.)
If you think I'm being unfriendly to people who distribute PDFs, well, yes, I am. (:-). PDF is a form of Postscript, a page description language, which has a much different purpose than content description languages like HTML and XML. It's really nice and powerful for describing how to make black or colored marks on dead trees, and if that's what you like, fine, but that's not as useful to the average reader as giving them content.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
PDF is an open standard. Anyone can create PDFs or programs that create/modify them without paying any royalties to Adobe. Adobe's viewer is not required to view or create PDFs.
Just because the company that created it makes bloated reader software does not make the format itself the "spawn of satan". PDFs are quite usable, thank you.
I think you mean " fewer functions than Acrobat."
For webmasters it is also very useful:
1. The contents of Unipage files are immune to direct linking:
* Your pages' internal content cannot be accessed by people who are not visiting your site.
* Be free of bandwidth theft.
Working in a print shop, the last thing I want is customers trying to add javascript or flash to their LETTERHEAD.
"What do you mean print is static?"
More importantly, PDF is an print industry standard. If Unipage cannot reproduce layout, fonts and colour seperations on any computer, the print industry will not adopt its usage.
Not even a contender for the PDF crown. If you need the reasons spelled out for you, you don't need PDF anyway. A nice idea, though.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Paraphrasing from what someone said about Fortran: I don't know how people will store data in fifty years time, but it will involve UTF8, XML and PDF. They are all three category killers for a particular task.
PDF is locked in for years in the Print/Design industry. It is now the industry standard to send files, many printers (including us) surcharge for files that are not PDF. All modern RIP's are PDF, practically every print workflow systems are ALL PDF based. Different doesn't mean better either. You can hardly say something is an alternative to a widley used product by reading an article.
tar
there you go, welcome to 1969, nothing to see here.
Yes, rename tar to 'unipageOMGl33t' and you have yourself a gold mine.
This is painful because noone has done it, I harp at pdf all day I hate it, why do people even use it?
WHY not put a html file in place of the pdf? it is madness.
die pdf, but don't let some floosy twat place a balled/zipped chunk of html in your place.
please type the word in this image: stream random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Indeed, CutePDF is the best PDF creating software (used as virtual PDF printer) I have ever encountered, is better than FreePDF and creates amazingly small .pdf files.
Well, when the creating company likes to threaten legal action and does persue on occasion, It makes people feel unsafe.
Supposing that I agree completely with what you've said, that still doesn't explain why it's in any way a good idea to use flash as a navigational tool on a website (like, for instance, on a movie's or video game's website). I don't think they're complaining about fine art or even things like strongbad, but I agree that flash makes for a pretty unusable user interface.
I work in producing software to support government archives, and it looks to me like Unipage won't fly for the kind of market we deal with. Electronic archives are supposed to hold documents pretty much forever. The official records of the UK treasury - on parchment - date back at least 900 years; this might seem exceptional, but some documents need held for 100 years+ for legal reasons. Even the 7 years you need to keep financial records is an eternity in software terms.
In this environment, you need an open standard, or software capable of displaying documents in a way that can be emulated (since hardware disappears). No hardware DRM dongles please, and no frickin plugins. Word is barely tolerated (its a generic container format, needing potentially infinite software support). By contrast the use of plugins in PDF is rare, and prohibited in PDF/X, so it suits us fine. It's a big step up from scanned images (and is better specified than eg TIFF 6)
Unipage on the other hand doesnt seem to improve things at all. Its just format that sticks things in an archive, not an archival format. Like Word, its dependent on an ever-disappearing ecosystem of undocumented plugins. If this somehow 'killed' pdf, we'd have to start archiving vmware snapshots instead of individual docs!
Not saying it doesn't have its uses, but just pointing out another perspective on why people use pdf...
Because I don't want ANNOYING GARBAGE filling up my screen when all I'm there to do is download one file. I don't want to have to wait 5 minutes for a page to load. It takes control away from the user most often, or forces us to get a plugin because the asshole who made it, didn't bother to make a standard page, just so we can find out the information we want isn't there. I don't care about art, your example makes me hate flash even more, just because it's linked to that waste of time.
.mpeg etc.
Flash can be incredible, YES, but it should have been a downloadable only format, and run like
"Yes, I know: sending a binary image by PDF wastes bandwidth; TIFF is much more efficient, and there are plenty of free TIFF viewers. But I can't assume that everybody has those viewers, and I'm not going to complicate my professional life by forcing people to download software when I know they already have software that will do the job."
TIFF is a bitch in itself.
When generating TIFF files, I started to discover that even if a user had a TIFF viewer, the odds of them being able to open the specific variety of TIFF which we created would vary. The only variety which all users could open was the uncompressed one. Every kind of compression we tried was unsupported in some particular app which the user insisted on using.
And of course, TIFF is awfully inefficient when sending uncompressed. You'd be better off with PNG in my opinion.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Hasn't this been available to Windows users for some time? .chm files.
I'm thinking of the Compiled Help aka
The free MS Help Compiler is a great way to save websites downloaded with the HTTrack Website Copier etc.
"If Adobe folds up tomorrow, PDF will survive."
Damn... that's a shame.
So, any idea how we can kill the beast which is PDF? There must be some way to get rid of the piece of crap.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
It's one of those irritating web pages that's for Windows only, yet has such a Windows-centric view of the world that it doesn't even say that it's Windows only! (Not on the Home or Download pages, anyway--didn't read anything else.) The hint is when your Mac wants to know what to do with the EXE file you've just downloaded.
May be the greatest thing ever, but it definitely started off on my wrong side...
Because I don't want ANNOYING GARBAGE filling up my screen when all I'm there to do is download one file. I don't want to have to wait 5 minutes for a page to load. It takes control away from the user most often, or forces us to get a plugin because the asshole who made it, didn't bother to make a standard page, just so we can find out the information we want isn't there.
.mpeg etc.
Flash can be incredible, YES, but it should have been a downloadable only format, and run like
This is a spyware/crap installer.
Isn't the internet wonderful?
True, but there is one reason for embedding Flash in HTML pages: Some Flash animations are designed for exactly one resolution and look like crap when viewed without something that defines the dimensions. However, if Flash included a command for "force the displayed animation to be X by Y" there would really be no reason fo embedding Flash in hTML.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Sorry, where you talking about .doc?
"where" -> "were"
I realy don't understand the I hate flash bias on this forum.
HTML is a free and open standard. So is SVG+SMIL+ECMAScript. SWF, on the other hand, is not; the only available implementation is from Adobe, which has tended to overcharge hobbyists. In addition, SWF probably doesn't scale down to battery-powered devices with a 67 MHz processor, 4 MB of RAM, and a 256x192 pixel display. In addition, there's a lot of existing SWF content that still breaks all the usability rules.
This is the multimedia, arty, entertainment side of the internet, not the informative - where Flash indeed can be a pain.
Trouble is that all too often, people have searched for information but ended up at net-art.
Will it print out as poorly as HTML or as well as PDF? If the former then I have to agree this will die on the vine.
Then how do you propose that magazine printers and regular print shops get their files to print that also have proper color specs, PS settings, vector art?
Quark is too inconsistent. Can't send a v6 file to a printer using v7 etc...
InDesign has gotten better but still not across the board (and an Adobe product so no thank you - PDF is not an Adobe product)
Go back to camera shots and plate seperation taking weeks to make spreads?
Or is it that you are annoyed how browsers tank the CPU when opening up the PDF?
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Some Flash animations are designed for exactly one resolution
Why is this so? Isn't SWF a scalable web format? Doesn't the reference SWF player incorporate full-scene antialiasing?
Microsoft Office format is pretty much the standard.
.DOC.
No, it's not. Any given MS document only renders correctly with the Microsoft Office edition in which it was made, and in no other renderer does it render perfectly. Further, this rendering is not guaranteed to be the same because there is no specification. Also, you can't embed fonts in it.
To top it off, even RTF, which Microsoft renders a spec for, isn't correctly rendered by any version of Word. So essentially there is no standard for any Microsoft document format.
To go further, though, office documents are not easily editable! In fact, they're almost more difficult to edit than PDFs are! Its a closed-source, binary file format with lots of quirks. You're not going to be editing it with a 50KB WYSIWYG editor like you can with HTML.
The point isn't that they're not easy to edit. The point is that they always look the same no matter how use 'em. Otherwise, Adobe wouldn't have released Acrobat (which can not only write, but also edit PDFs), would they? The only reason that they're not easy to edit is because the document format is a functional subset of PS, and that is more of a drawing format with built-in text writing than it is a document format. Its a technical limitation, not a designed feature. Acrobat would be a real cash-cow if Adobe could suddenly create a decent document writer for it that competes with Word.
Yeah, a do-all format should be easily edited and universally standard. But sometimes the do-all product isn't the best. If I send a file in PDF, it's in PDF for a reason. If I just wanted to make sure it was readable, I'd send it as
I take it you're not a programmer. Or if you are, then you're a Microsoft junkie. There are PDF libraries for virtually every programming language for free or cheap. There are almost no DOC generating libraries. Even if there were, doc is not a standard as I have said.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
document authors who use PDF generally do it because ... they want to send an exactly-formatted hard-to-modify document so the readers just read it and don't do anything interesting with it
The obvious application of this is to make sure that all parties to an agreement sign the same written contract, especially when parts of the contract refer to other parts of the contract by page number.
Don't get out much, do you?
e
Google it or lookie here:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ax
Welcome to our century.
For printing tasks, PostScript seemed to work perfectly fine before PDF existed. For web browsing, users should never be subjected to a format which stores text as binary.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Support vector-based documents, allowing both text and graphics to scale to any size?
Of course an XHTML page Supports Vector Graphics.
Provide a way to cryptographicly sign a document?
Wouldn't that be the function of dedicated crypto software such as PGP or GPG?
Attempt to tackle the "portable" in PDF? Are you kidding me? It looks like a Windows-only download.
I don't know about this product in particular, but if I were implementing it, I would use MIME files (an IETF recommendation, which you called "MHT") using HTML (a W3C recommendation) and CSS Paged Media (also a W3C recommendation), which can be viewed on any viewer that implements such recommendations. I'm guessing that if this in fact uses MIME files, then the innovation is a working implementation of CSS Paged Media.
Support e-book DRM features?
Why would anybody need to use digital restrictions management?
Fine if you're print monospace or whatever font the printer has and dont forget about the images as well. PDF is PS with embedded fonts and images.
That's how PDF is exactly the same across platforms.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Or you can use HTML and embed everything using data: URLs - RFC 2397
So if I embed an image using a data: URL, can I use it more than once in the document without having to bloat it with a separate copy of the image for each instance?
On the server side ...
No, it's not a valid reason. It's wrong. Every browser's *address bar* is good enough at indicating that you are leaving some domain, and this does it create a usability nightmare for visitors to the site.
I know what you're saying, but I think this kind of behaviour attempts to solve a problem that just isn't there, and creates a mess in the process.
http://outcampaign.org/
I know the difference, but it's good to mention the CHM format here.
ZIP FILES are a way to store a complete web page as just one file!
http://outcampaign.org/
Funny, I used to submit reports in PostScript format all the time, and those used to have images. Did it suddenly become less featureful in recent years or is it just something that happened as soon as PDF was created?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
HTML is a way of describing documents so that they can be viewed and interacted with on a lot of platforms. It will NOT look the same on all platforms, it will NOT print well on all platforms (as a matter of fact, it will probably print very poorly on most platforms)
I know what you mean. Those GIF and Flash animations don't print well at all.
Unless I can get a 24 page per second printer...
There are several glaring holes in the functionality presented in Unipage. PDF allows you to design a page with all sorts of fonts, and then embed the fonts in the PDF so anyone who can open a PDF can display the design in it's correct formatting. PDF's can have all sorts of file types embedded in the main document. The main issue I think is vector graphics, that can be scaled, resolution independent. This is a nice effort, but there's no real functionality, and certainly not for the Print and Design World.
I know I'm the umpteenth person to point it out, but there's now a "format" consisting of a fancy way to zip a web page? Well, I guess that means I need to quit reading /. and get my butt to work filing a patent for this nonesense.
On second thought. Who in their right mind, much less among the slashdot crowd thinks that .pdf is anything but a complete pain in the ass? Yes, they print the same, and you can print to them out of various and sundry applications that are to crappy to properly export data. So I'll give you that .pdf is better than... well it's sometimes better than the alternative, but this thing sounds like a slightly less elegant solution than using powerpoint. (Shudder)
Needs to be updated for 1.5.0.1
I get it, this is a post from a prototype AI extension for EMACS, which uses Bayesian algorithms to write for users automatically. This one seems to be trained with previous Slashdot posts and stories in order to turn +5, insightful posting into an automated process.
Sorry, Saven Marek, your bot needs a little more training.
your usage of the term doesn't rear its lazy head until 1983.
several references have thrown up their hands at this nonsense, but most agree it's a bastardization of the original term.
making new words is how a lanuguage evolves.
changing the meaning of existing words is ignorant and lazy.
rationalize away, god knows it's easier than actual thought.
if the purpose is to make a page into one file, why not just make a browser plug-in that can read from a zip?
Investigate PDF workflows for prepress sometime. That's the reason it's so popular in publishing. When everything had to be done in PS, the tools available were few, cumbersome and very expensive. PS is, once you get slightly complex, device dependent and it's difficult to retask. I can do a lot on my desktop to put a book together that 10 years ago I'd have been using physical paste-up and film-stripping for.
As for browsing, I'm less enthused, but it allows publishers to very simply make information available online that was designed for print. The user's manuals for many devices, for instance, that I often refer to, would probably be huge TIFF files if they were available at all. HTML might be preferable, but with imperfect and tedious translation needed mostly it just wouldn't happen at all.
Just because changes happen, doesn't mean that the changes aren't fucking stupid, and doesn't make people who defend said stupid changes not look like fucking idiots.
The rips we used to send to require images to be external before PDFx
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Seems more like Portable HTML Help from Windows rather than PDF. Maybe they should focus on that.
There's a Firefox extension ScreenGrab that uses Java to grab an entire Webpage and save it as an image file (PNG). No Flash/animations etc., but that's okay -- it only means you won't have flashing ads in the saved Webpage. ;-) And since the output is an image, you don't need a "Unifier Viewer", say.
http://andy.5263.org/screengrab/
Very interesting. So how does one convince holders of other document formats that they too wish to be FIPS-compliant, and therefore should be happy to open their document specs??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Thanks for the references. Oh wait.
"Idiot. Ghostsript" is modded informative? What the hell is /. coming to? Rude ridiculous childish remarks and abusive behaviour are encouraged. That's insane. I don't care how knowledgable you are, or how wrong someone is, starting off by calling them an idiot is just ridiculous.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've never tried that IE function, but this sounds similar.
PDF is really designed to store a document in electronic format exactly as it would appear on the printed page. If you print it, it will look exactly like the author intended. This (and HTML in general) are meant to convey information and let it be displayed differently on different devices.
A bit off-topic, but whatever. Is there a Windows Postscript viewer with a better GUI than Ghostview?
Converting the ps files to pdf and then using a PDF viewer isn't a good solution for me.
Actually, it does do something: it turns the devs away from fixing the bug, so they can spite the annoying, demanding users. See for example the reaction to the 600+ people who were upset at Mozilla pulling MNG support from the browser. I believe Asa even said something to the effect that because so many users were complaining, they were never going to let MNG support back in.
This is why I have the following lines in my userContent.css file (in Firefox):
I got this from someone here on /., my apologies to that person that I can't remember the source. Anyway it makes life easier being able to see at a glance whether a link goes to a new page, a pdf file, is javascript, or not.
Is this not just encoding pages, images, etc as multi-part mime responses? Or something different? The website is a bit light on details.
Boy, the submissions today are weak. An slashvertisment for a crappy-by-description (and dead before being born) product, perpetual motion, what else?
I agree about Adobe bloat.Here is the link to foxit -http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php-IMO ,A MUCH better reader than Adobe.Fast loading,Non Bloated,Free,And isn't a resource piggy.Great little program.Until I found it like you I looked at PDF as a landmine to be avoided.Now thanks to foxit even on my old 500 Mhz I keep around as a parts tester pdf files load easily and smooth.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Why is acroread a spawn of satan? I use PDFs for everything. LaTeX to generate them, and acroread to view them. The third party viewers don't render PDFs as accurately or as cleanly as acroread, and acroread 7 is blazing fast.
What happens if the rules suck?
If someone hadn't broken "the usability rules" we wouldn't have any progress.
The GUI broke the rules.
Won't happen (taking a non-PDF/x1A file) -- I so pity the idiot that tries to send me a file like this when I'm under press deadlines. Your a$$ is mine, on a silver platter so that I can drop kick it into the nearest dry river bed.
It has taken several years for all the bugs and hiccups in PDF/x1A to be worked out.
Even with everything set up correctly and double checked - there are still color issues that arise when the pages hit the imagesetters.
I get the arguements from several advertising agencies -- it's so hard to create a PDF/x1A -- can't you just take the high -res pdf?? NO -- it's a standard for a reason -- because the just out of school designers (that didn't learn everything in school like they thought they did) are not adept at creating and making sure all the steps are followed.
Ugh.
Now if points could be fixed to traditional instead of post script, I'd be a very happy designer!
design is art - art is design
I didn't RTFA, but: Just translate every "src",etc. attributes http:, https: ftp:, etc. into int's corresponding data: URI? It's not exactly hard, try it yourself at http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/data/data. The result is not /. comment compatible, but quite usable in html per se. Scripts and CSS can be embedded even easier.
Actually, I wrote "Gostscript". And I gave a link to the GS home page, which was presumably what people thought was informative. As for "idiot", yes, not very polite, but the OP was not just in error on an abstruse detail, but completely wrong on a simple matter of fact, and proceeding to abuse companies on the basis of his falsehood. So maybe "dickhead" or "troll" would have been more appropriate than "idiot".
Has everyone forgotten that the purpose of html is that the pages look different on different devices?
While I agree that this is the original purpose of HTML, and the best purpose (IMHO), HTML has long since been perverted with things like pixel-level positioning in CSS into a layout markup language. Regrettable, but you can't take the general document-designing world and try to teach them to think in an abstract fashion when they are accustomed to thinking in a visual fashion about things. Real HTML only lasted as long as the people writing documents were computer science types.
I remember when using I tags was advised against, since the end user might not have an output device that could display italics -- EM was preferred. Boy, are those days long in the past.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Adobe has gone from being a technology driven company that does interesting creative things, to a marketing driven company that slowly pares back functionality in its Acrobat products and charges you more for the privilege.
I've thought a lot about why companies seem to suck more as they get bigger.
I've a number of theories -- here's a plausible one. If you start a company with five people, everyone is driven and interested in the idea. There is no room for dead weight, so everyone there is actually working with the team. Everyone sees the contribution that they make to the business. Everyone is familiar with the product, so you don't run into the embarassing inefficiencies common in large businesses. These come up when someone produces a requirement and after filting down through three layers of people, it hits someone who has to fulfill that requirement, who thinks "this is stupid; I could do a much better job by taking a different approach", but is too far away from the requirement-issuer to do anything about it. As a result, you have a driven, connected, knowledgeable set of people doing a good job.
I can think of very few companies that have not increasingly sucked as they have gotten larger. Once you don't know most of the people at the company, you start having a problem, IMHO.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
And yet, *every time* I ask for examples of sites that are so elegant and usable on Slashdot, I get these links to absolutely abysmal sites.
I think the only time I've seen a single practically useful application of Flash was when Creative Labs was trying to show of the interface to their new MP3 player and wanted to interactively demo it online.
I'm not saying that it isn't fun for people to *make* Flash sites, but it's like someone painting for fun. There's nothing wrong with it as a fun hobby, but it's pretty unlikely to actually be something good in the absolute sense of the word.
Jakob Nielson isn't always fun and exciting in what he says, but I rarely disagree with him. Usability is all that matters in the long run. A Flash site can offer nothing more than a brief bit of novelty, and all the time spent developing it could have been spent developing useful content.
Look at Google. They stomped all their competitors. There were a number of reasons for this, but one of the most obvious is that they were as simple and minimalist as possible. Winning websites are minimalist. That doesn't mean dumbed-down or feature-reduced.
Amazon.com, for example, has great features. However, it is approaching the point where *I* am intimidated by all the features jammed onto one page, and I happily use emacs each day.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
So where's the latest speficiation for the 7.0 format? Where's their documentation on how to implement the DRM of features? Oh yeah! Someone had to reverse engineer those.
- should ideally make your browser crash or stop responding
Yes. I dread that moment of churning on a Windows browser where someone has the Adobe PDF webbrowser plugin installed. A significant percentage of the time, it winds up killing the browser, and if it doesn't, it's slow to load.
Xpdf under Linux makes me much happier.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
There are OSS tools that let you read/write MS Word files, what's your point? Yes, they have documented PDF to an extent, but what about all the crap they keep tacking on? Where's the DRM documentation? What about all the other 7.x additions (along with full scripting crap)?
.doc.
I'll note that I've used the OSS tools. Just now I tried converting the latest official spec for PDF to another format with an OSS tool, they were all giving errors that they couldn't recognize certain parts of it. Sounds a lot like
Open up links in new windows, unless its for a reason.
I thought that there was some sort of link attribute that would allow this to happen. I wish to high heaven webpage authors would actually use the damned thing instead of Javascript so that I could disable it and never have this behavior and not break other websites.
The only environment in which I can imagine someone actually wanting the remote website being able to change the function of your left mouse button is if your hand is fused to your mouse and the fingers over the left and right mouse button have been cut off. When I want a new tab, I'll middle-click.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
It's called "WinZip", and even that one had many preceding equivalents that could collect all the different files that make up a webpage and turn them into a single file.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
In case you're happy that "a browser" doesn't include Microsoft Internet Explorer, which doesn't support the data: URL spec (RFC 2397), be my guest. There isn't anything magically going on. According to RFC 2397 you can encode an external document, including all its data data, to an URL. Basically, you just need to prefix data:image/png;base64, to base64 encoded PNG image and paste the resulting string to SRC attribute of IMG element and you're done embedding the PNG image inside a HTML document.
Did I mention that MSIE does NOT support RFC 2397? So, you can use this method for every other browser but for MSIE and you have to use Microsoft's proprietary .MHT format for MSIE. IMO, it's not worth the trouble, just use PDF instead.
Wake me up again once somebody comes up with a way to put a HTML page with at least (originally) external PNG and CSS files inside a single file that can be viewed correctly without plugins with MSIE, Mozilla, Safari and Konqueror.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
several times. zip, tar, gzip, bzip, 7zip, dmgs. seriously... just write a web browser plugin that reads tarballs and you are done. this is not a valid reason to make up a custom file format.
really... I don't see why people are so adverse to using a directory structure to package things... there's no reason to come up with some weird ass custom format for flattening everything.
now... on a different topic. I think PDF's are pretty great... for distributing documents to print, and ebooks, and what not... but why do people put pages of text on the web in pdf? I suspect they are just lazy. most of my profs in the cs department seem to be mac users, so I think they've gotten into the habit of "saving to print" every document they put together and want to post on the website. really... pretty much everything will spit out html for you. use that.
actually you can embed fonts, crabby says so!
1 193841033.aspx
Best practice #2: Have fonts, will travel
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA01
Just because the company that created it makes bloated reader software does not make the format itself the "spawn of satan". PDFs are quite usable, thank you.
Unfortunately, every viewer is the same crap - maybe not quite as bloated, but still completely useless. The format itself may be fine, but it is not text, so without a useable viewer, the format itself is useless.
Until every PDF file comes with a built-in printer (I don't have one, and I'm not going to buy one just to view PDF files), every PDF is going straight to recycle.bin.
it's not genetically ethnic, it's a choice to just let it go.
toddlers often mispronounce these words.
parents with a clue usually correct them.
if they don't bother, they grow up saying these things.
doesn't stop them from becoming preachers, teachers or presidents though.
Setting up your first PDF/x1A is cumbersome but it is so well worth it.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Most companies don't even allow
Yeah really. Why would I want portably tarball'd banner ads...
This sounds an awful lot like the MHTML format, which basically turns a web page together with images, css, flash, etc. into a MIME-style file.
Man am I glad I don't work with you. You don't see a problem with insulting a total stranger out of the blue for being (admitedly very) wrong, but are willing to admit your insult was inprecise. You must be a lonely, lonely person.
By the way I did notice the link but since typing Ghostscript into google gets you the same, I'd say that is redundant.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Thanks for the examples of why you think it's useless. Oh wait.
LOL, no its harmless...
You must be very new to the Internet. If you want to spend your life remonstrating with anonymous posters about their lack of civility you have a long disappointing task ahead of you. Good luck. Though I personally rarely indulge in name-calling these days, in this case it seemed appropriate. In real life, of course, I'd just back away from someone expressing their ignorance in such a way.
By the way I did notice the link but since typing Ghostscript into google gets you the same, I'd say that is redundant.
I didn't mod my post, if someone did think it was "informative" or whatever take it up with them. My point was exactly that the argument was trivially refuted, not that Ghostscript is an arcane subject only I know about.
Did you know that Maynard only believes what his publicist and label have told him? He may be well-informed about other issues, but not music sharing. ...as well, Tool is the same as Metallica as far as these things go. They don't need P2P to grow the way most newer bands do, so of course they want to put a stop to the 'tape-trading' of today.
I can't wait to download an early release of their new album (they just finished mastering, some underpaid studio lackey is probably leaking it right now), decide it's shit just like Lateralus, and tell everyone I know not to buy it.
You must be very new to the Internet
Oh yeah. First login around 1995. Very new.
If you want to spend your life remonstrating with anonymous posters about their lack of civility you have a long disappointing task ahead of you.
I see how it's lost on you.
Good luck.
Thanks.
Though I personally rarely indulge in name-calling these days, in this case it seemed appropriate
A personal attack on someone who has made a factual error is not at all appropriate. Do you often get called an idiot? How does it feel?
For goodness sake the information you gave was bollox as well. There are much better free PDF solutions than Ghostscript out there. Have you ever tried to get around the limitations of Ghostscript on windows? Nice bit of arrogance there.
In real life, of course, I'd just back away from someone expressing their ignorance in such a way.
For future reference, that's called cowardice, and a complete lack of tact and social skills. Nice proof your interest wasn't in being informative etc.
You could just as easily have said "What about Ghostscript, that's free and does PDF." or even told the poster to check his facts before posting. But no, "Idiot. Ghostscript". Very succinct. Exactly correct. Very unhelpful. Very rude. You managed to turn it into a pissing contest. You were being the archtypical alpha geek, and you're defending this behaviour.
I didn't mod my post, if someone did think it was "informative" or whatever take it up with them.
How precisely should I do that given that who modded isn't public. By any chance, would it be common practice here to reply to the modded comment and point out that there's a problem with it? Oh wait, that's what I did.
My point was exactly that the argument was trivially refuted
Your point was to call someone who posted a comment with a factual error in it a fool. Any other side effect is just a bonus.
not that Ghostscript is an arcane subject only I know about.
Frankly, I doubt you know that much about it. But that again is typical here. Occassional end users spouting off as if they're experts.
Grow up.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You must be very new to the Internet
Oh yeah. First login around 1995. Very new
Hey, pissing contest!
I first went online about 1978. On the web about 1994.
A personal attack on someone who has made a factual error is not at all appropriate.
If that had been all he'd said, I would have been gentler. But he proceeded to launch an attack on Adobe's policies on the basis of his made-up fact. A bit like invading a country after claiming they have WMDs with no proof, and deserving of the same response.
There are much better free PDF solutions than Ghostscript out there
There may well be, though I suspect that many use GS code under the hood. I only needed one example, and GS is the one I'm familiar with (Yes, I actually use it; before PDF it was about the only way to proof PS on screen, and I used it for a while to render to a PCL LJ3.)
My point was exactly that the argument was trivially refuted
Your point was to call someone who posted a comment with a factual error in it a fool.
Yes, that too. But the world is full of fools (this is a straight line for you, if you want); I don't respond unless it's an issue I care about.
Hey, pissing contest!
Very original. Oh wait. Where have I heard these words before?
I wasn't the one that started the "You must be new here" BS.
If that had been all he'd said, I would have been gentler.
He didn't abuse you. You did abuse him. As far as I'm concerned you at best managed to sink lower. Congrats.
There may well be, though I suspect that many use GS code under the hood.
Who cares? Certainly not most end users. They only care if it works or not. You demonstrated by pointing him to something that doesn't work so well. Congrats again.
Total care that you think I'm a fool. Zero. You sir have the social skills of an intellectually handicapped gnat. Good day.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Who cares? Certainly not most end users. They only care if it works or not. You demonstrated by pointing him to something that doesn't work so well. Congrats again.
This guy (or is it you under another name? I wonder why you're so determined to defend some random poster) didn't ask "What's a good way to make PDFs? Please advise." What he said was:
My original reply pointed out, economically, that he was wrong in his assumptions and conclusions. That's all.
Total care that you think I'm a fool. Zero. You sir have the social skills of an intellectually handicapped gnat. Good day.
Somehow you've construed that I've called you a fool. Well, with my deficient social skills I'm incapable of subtle insults, so I'm afraid you were off the mark. But since you're spoiling for it, I'll give you closure: You're a pretentious twat.
It sounds like a proprietary format filled with security problems. Furthermore, it's a webpage, which makes it quite useless for the normal application of PDF files as a print-ready document format. I for one will steer well clear of it.
OpenDocument would be a far better solution. So, thanks for the slashvertisement, but... no thanks.
I never said that .DOC was a standard, I said it was pretty much standard. As in, the most widely used, even if it's proprietary. To you, 'easily editable' means that it's well-documented and can be opened by many programs equally well. To most people, 'easily editable' means that if they double-click on the file, they will then be able to edit it. (let me give you a hint - by this method, PDF is not easily editable, while .DOC is)
.ODT. However, I understand that very few of the people I send files to will be able to open that. So if it's something I know the recipient will need to edit, it's getting sent as .DOC, because guess what almost every USER (not programmer) has the highest compatibility with? If the recipient has no need to edit the file, then it'll get sent as a PDF because I know they will see it just as I have.
I'm neither a programmer nor a 'Microsoft Junkie.' I'm an engineering student. I use OpenOffice, and save all my work in
Computers need to explode more often.
Support? As usual - by every current browser except IE. IE6 sp2 dropped support for XBM (which was poor man's canvas in IE).