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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.
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.
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
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.
pdf's are editable. not just through adobe's software, but 3rd party apps like pitstop. and personally, i have edited dozens of pdf forms. by the way, nearly all documents are printable. pdf's are great because they print the same no matter what app created it or what app you are viewing it in. (for the most part anyway) i agree that unipage is not a pdf replacement, though. i hope the text editors out there allow for a "save as unicode" option, as that may allow for a little more competition against word.
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
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..
Idiot. Ghostscript
No, it doesn't.
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.
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.
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.
the point of "vaporware" is generally that it never gets to 1.0. indeed, most would say that it never hits 0.1, at least not in a form anyone ever gets to look at. the next Duke Nukem is the canonical example - people've been talking about it for years, but hardly anybody expects to ever actually see it. as long as the app is real/available and more-or-less does what it claims, it's not vaporware, no matter how useless (not, incidentally, that i'm endorsing a position that this particular app is useless; i'm reserving judgement on that).
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
"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.
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
I think the poster was thinking more along these lines.
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.
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.
MHTML Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=212&application=firefox
There are a number of Open Source Acrobat replacements; GhostScript can be used instead of Acrobat Distiller to generate PDF (including with PDF-specific contents), and xpdf for display.
Or you can use HTML and embed everything using data: URLs - RFC 2397
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.
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.
I can't count how many times I go to a college athletic website to look at season stats or roster information and almost everything on the site is in PDF. For the same size of page in html the stupid page would be smaller/load faster.
They didn't want to make two different versions, one in PDF and one in HTML. Of the two, they chose PDF because it's printer-friendly. If you're frustrated by the long time it takes AR to load, then why are you still using AR as your PDF plugin? I use xpdf as my browser plugin, and there's virtually no delay at all.
Find free books.
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.
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!
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.
SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics
Vectors graphics turned into a small XML file, coming soon to a browser near you, unless you use Firefox 1.5 in which case, you've got it already.
Just needs a little more time to mature and stabalize and it will be very commonplace.
Um, didn't you just do that in HTML? You need to talk to yourself more. (Yeah, yeah, I know, but it is funny on this side of the monitor.
I'm looking for a Windows driver that will capture my GDI calls and render to HTML. Any suggestions?
You might want to look at libwmf - search for SVG inside the page. It's isn't exactly what you want, but if you can capture your GDI to a WMF, you're GTG. (Good to go.)
No-one has included a link to SVG related material. There you go.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.