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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.
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.
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
Idiot. Ghostscript
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.
"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
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.
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!