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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.
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
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!
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 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 != 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...
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)