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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.
- 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.
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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.
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!
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"
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.
Umm no. Have you ever seen the power of the math package on LaTeX? I can create horrendously complicated expressions? HTML? You probably mean Math ML - this depends on browser support, and, (you guessed it), rendering depends on the browser.
As others pointed out - you lose the whole "looks same everywhere" aspect once you move away from DVI, PS and PDF. I mean for crying out loud - you have to put *hacks* in your CSS just to get the same page looking right between IE and Mozilla-based browsers. This isn't a solution.
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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Write boring code, not shiny code!
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
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.
Idiot. Ghostscript
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.
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.
You're so wrong on this that I printed your comment as a PDF in OS X just to spite you.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Yup, Ghostscript is very handy. On Windows, CutePDF and PDF Creator both wrap the Ghostscript engine in a friendly-to-non-techies UI.
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I agree with you. It seems like everything people are saying is how it doesn't stack up to all the slick shiney features of PDF. The problem I see is that people are using PDF's far too much for things that don't need to be PDF. 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. I want to puke when I see the acrobat reader splash screen come on when I want to look at a file that would amount to less than a printed page. PDF's may be great for some applications, but most applications I see them used for would be better suited as standard web pages.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
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.
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.
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.
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