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.

Comments

Yet another ill informed opinion about PDF

[Tet]

But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page.

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.

Waaaay behind

[FortKnox]

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.

Try to think, you twit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not have some pages *for* *download* so you can see how they are stored?

Re:No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. La

[fireboy1919]

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.

HTML is the be-all... not

[Merdalors]

prefer to make a PDF document of something when they could just display it in HTML

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?

Re:*Not* a PDF Killer

[b1t r0t]

And more importantly, it's Yet Another Damn Document Format. I'm annoyed enough that people are making DejaVu documents. (and usually their excuse is that it's 5% smaller than PDF, never mind that Acrobat Pro will let you tune the DPI and compression) When they finally came out with a Mac reader app, I tried printing a DJVU document and found that it printed at a lower resolution than what was displayed on-screen! This was just a scan of some old software documentation (late '80s) so I doubt it was just an optional DRM feature that the document creator turned on. We don't need another YADDF with no Mac reader out there.

I was also annoyed when I found people using a "Comic Book" format (.CBZ/.CBR) for scans of old video game magazines until I found out that it was just a ZIP or RAR full of JPEGs. At that point I was still slightly annoyed at the careless use of the wrong file extension (many reader programs are stupid and only look at the file name instead of the first 4 bytes of the file), but quite relieved that it was such a straightforward format.

Re:Why it can kill pdf

[jedrek]

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.

Open Source Acrobat

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Open Source Acrobat

[dkf]

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.

DVI isn't really an alternative to PDF except for certain simple tasks. DVI's biggest advantage is that its viewers tend to be very fast to start up, but its major problem is that it doesn't do embedding of graphics well (OK, a feature that can be abused, but also one that's really useful in many documents). FWIW, even in the academic world you're starting to see PDF taking over from DVI (and PS) since it works well, has reasonable viewers, and many free creation tools (including directly from LaTeX, my favourite route).

Re:Open Source Acrobat

[Dolda2000]

DVI isn't really an alternative to PDF. DVI wasn't ever intended as a file format to distribute documents, but rather as an intermediate file format used within a complete TeX system. I'd say it is more or less comparable to object files, as generated by e.g. C compilers. It doesn't embed either fonts or external graphics. It's just a list of instructions for typesetting the final document, whether it is as PostScript, PDF, printer output or on a user's screen. It's not really meant to be copied between systems, however.

PostScript and PDF, on the other hand, contain everything about the document they describe in one single file, which is completely independent of external sources (although they can reference external fonts if so instructed, and usually do for the most common ones).

PDF = "e-Paper"

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:PDF = "e-Paper"

[bugg]

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.

Don't you own a pen and white-out?

I don't know about you, but a big chunk of the PDFs I download are forms. It'd be nice to have a OSS program around where I could open up the PDF and (gasp) fill in the form, then save it as a new PDF to do whatever I please with.

I'm a big fan of PDF -- I'm glad we live in a world now where I can hand in assignments and the like in PDF. It frees me up to use pretty much whatever tools I want. That being said, I'd also be a big fan of an open source application that allowed me to edit PDFs.

PDF is about having a document that displays and prints the same anywhere. It's NOT about having a document that's hard to edit --- and anyone who says so is merely apologizing for the lack of free PDF editors.

Re:I think some people here are missing the point

[Vellmont]

The reason you see PDF so often is it's a really easy transition from paper, which everyone is familiar with the tools to produce printed documents. If you don't use PDF, maintaining a website with information changing on a daily basis like that takes either a lot of maintenance by someone who knows HTML or some GUI tool, or a more sophisticated database driven application that's custom build for that sort of thing.

Re:Different Purposes

[Raenex]

I agree. I'm surprised so many Slashdot posters ignore the benefits of HTML over PDF. While PDF has its uses, the vast majority of items that people insist on stuffing into PDF would be more usable as HTML. This includes stuff like research papers, tech specs, etc.

Re:No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. La

[yurigoul]

I realy don't understand the I hate flash bias on this forum. I like the net-art side of the internet and it is amusing - and sometimes bad, but I like it. And a lot of it is done in flash, and a great many of the links I get for it come from Rhizome - an organisation linked to the NY museum of Modern Art.

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.

Re:No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. La

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

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).

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.

Re:*Not* a PDF Killer

[KagatoLNX]

PDF != Adobe?

Tell that to Dmitri Skylarov.

Like it or not, to download the PDF spec, you have to agree not to "violate" the DRM, among other things. Of course, you could try to clean room reverse engineer it, but that would kill the portable part fairly quickly, since the DMCA would most likely cover "circumventing DRM" even in a clean room implementation.

De facto, PDF == Adobe.

Also, PDFs are not made to simply represent the print layout. While that is their most beneficial feature, PDF does a lot more. It provides bookmark navigation and can be used to reformat the document to different page sizes when the document is properly generated.

As for "read only", well, I've been paid hourly to modify a PDF'd contract prior to signing (which was perfectly legal and delightfully unexpected by the other party). Once of the happiest moments in my life was removing the section that said the contract was void if it was modified. It was an eye-opening and kind of surreal moment. It was also the first time I ever heard a lawyer giggle...

From a technical perspective (having tried to manually work with PDF at a file level) its horrible. The format more closely resembles FAT than PostScript (contrary to popular belief--I am painfully serious about this). It's broken into blocks with a weird allocation table. Originally, it appears the idea was to make it editable (although "editing" a PDF in anything is pretty painful). As such, even though I don't currently recommend much other than PDF for my customers, I don't feel very much love towards it either.

In the spirit of offering solutions instead of only complaints, I like SVG quite a bit, SVG-P (standard with SVG 2.0) more, and actually find XSL-FO the easiest to work with.I currently crank out a few invoices per month and some finanacial reports with XSL-FO and FOP. Even though they end up in PDF, I really wish XSL-FO was the de facto standard instead of PDF...