Acrobat-killer Submitted to Standards Body

Flying Wallenda writes "Did Adobe make a tactical blunder when it complained to the European Union about Microsoft including support for its XML Paper Specification (XPS) in Windows Vista and Office 2007? Now that Microsoft has decided to submit its 'PDF killer' to a standards-setting organization, Adobe may be regretting its decision. 'Microsoft is looking again at its license in order to make it compatible with open source licenses, which means that the "covenant not to sue" will likely be extended to cover any intellectual property dispute stemming from the simple use or incorporation of XPS. The end result is that using XPS may be considerably more attractive for developers now that the EU has apparently expressed concerns over the license.'"

Comments

Re:Times are a changin'

[GigsVT]

PDF already is compatible in the ways you state, is stable, and exists in many ISO approved forms. ISO 15930-2 ISO 15930-6:2003(E) i.e. PDF/X driven by prepress industry, PDF/A ISO standard requested by the US government.

We already have a standard, open, format for this sort of presentation. We don't need another. We REALLY don't need another from a company that is known to "embrace and extinguish" competing implementations of standards.

Re:If only pdf would really die.

[GigsVT]

PDF is not a de facto standard. As I mentioned in another post, there are ISO standards for PDF. The spec is fully open, you could go download it now, no agreeing to anything required (though it is something like 1100 pages, better get some coffee).

Re: Adobe is screwed? Ha.

[TheNetAvenger]

Does XPS do all that? Does XPS do CMYK? Can XPS generate the equivalent of PDF/X-1a, an ISO standard for advertising specs required by Time Inc. and other big media sites?


Ok, by now everyone reading this has surely looked up XPS and can see that it has not only several features that PDF technology doesn't, but it leapfrogs the PDF/Postscript technology in many areas, even including not static publishing concepts that will be a part of the upcoming generation with Electronic Inks.

XPS also is going to hurt Adobe hard in the printer and publishing industry. There are already a number of consumer printers with XPS technology coming to the market and there are also many digital presses that will offer XPS instead of PDF, because it is free to do so instead of paying the Adobe tax.

So for large publishers there is already a bit of a buzz about it, as it may reduce the digital press costs without the Adobe licensing and they are also looking at some of the new features of XPS that will speed up production and produce better quality output easier. (Less need for rasterization and conversion from the original artwork, better font support, etc.)

One of the biggest problems in the digital prining industry now is making sure the content they are producing 'outputs' properly in PDF/Poscript. And this is a BIG issue.

For example I can create Brochure now in AI or CorelDraw that will output with clipping problems when it goes to PDF format because PDF just doesn't handle all the features that full scale vector/layer illustration software offers.

Now when trying to get this to a digital PDF/Postscript based press, this is a MAJOR issue, and the artwork has to be complexity reduced, have the clipping fixed, and often most of the Brochure ends up being rasterized at the press's resolution because the Vector and Font support in a PDF fails miserably.

These types of problems have been big issues in the publising/printing community for a long time, and Postscript v3/PDF was supposed to help, but instead things have often gotten worse. So why even have PDF based press when we (as publishers) end up rasterizing the entire brochure and artwork and are basically sending a PDF Bitmap to the device so it prints as designed?

Here is where XPS steps in and takes control of the ball, it has the preservation because of the extra features in the specification, so there is less fighting with fonts and less rasterization.

There is also the factor that no special software is needed, as Vista does all the XPS work inherently, which opens the door up for more flexibility in design software used as well. (Yes OSX does Postscript/PDF, and even WindowsXP does Postscript printer output, but there is a world of difference in the way Vista handles the from screen to document to output device because of the XAML and XPS technologies.)

XPS is being seen as a welcome fix to many Adobe PDF/Postscript issues in the printing industry.

To fully understand how XPS/XAML technologies work and also to see what they offer than PDF doesn't, you just need to go read the XPS specifications, also do a search on the printer and press manufacturers that are planning on XPS devices and why they see XPS has a good technology.

Not a thing correct

[maggard]

Please, in the future, before posting an explanation kindly know what in the hell you're babbling on about.

PostScript and PCL are most certainly used for nearly the same purposes: A Page Description Language, aka PDL. Indeed PCL was explicitly created by HP as a simpler, faster and unlicensed alternative to PostScript.

Postscript & PDF are related in that PDF is based on Postscript (a well written brief history of PDF). PDF simply builds upon PS to include meta information, JavaScript, hyperlinking (internally & externally), forms & tag structures, extended colorspaces, etc. And yes, many Postscript level 3 printers can directly print PDF. (That you're unfamiliar with this feature is likely due to your apparent near complete ignorance of high end or prepress printing.)

Oh, and most self-respecting printers don't support PCL, just those from HP or licensing PCL or it's clones (yes, the PostScript workalike has its own clone market!) Further confusing things HP now uses a PostScript clone called Phoenix in their laser printers so they can offer ps support without paying Adobe licensing fees.

Of course, PostScript & PDF are now publicly documented and it is possible to recreate them, with Ghostscript being the best known example (Phoenix is probably the most widely distributed)

Lastly, XPS is just a document format as is ODF, PDF,, NO. Nothing about that is right, indeed it pretty much completes every statement in your posting being flat out wrong or wildly inaccurate.

Go away and don't post again until you have something at least marginally correct or interesting to "News for Nerds". You're drooling in public and it is ugly, annoying, and counter-productive.

Re:PDF is too complicated

[red_crayon]

using TeX or whatever

And that's bad because...?

You want a programmatic way to generate PDF,
yet you eschew pdfTeX, which is a
compiled language that produces PDF as native output,
and is a descendent of TeX, a language invented by
Knuth, a programmatic fellow if there ever was one.