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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.'"
Pretty soon the word 'killer' will have lost its original meaning. In fact, it will be a compliment to be called a 'killer' because it means you were a solution for a problem that already had a widely popular solution.
Yet you overcame that and somehow became the new solution until you yourself were killed. And your functionality was conveyed specifically by saying '<competing solution> killer.' They couldn't even take the time to mention what it was you did.
Slashdot uses this way too much.
Killer.
I find it telling that so much of what big companies like Microsoft try to create is intended to be some kind of Killer. Rather than come up with something brand new that the market has never seen before, they wait for someone else to do just that, and then they try to Kill it and claim its glory for themselves.
Assuming this standard is truly open... and compatible with the GPL (like... you don't have to sign agreements with Microsoft to implement it... which is their usual trick)... and has no submarine issues... then why would I care that it's from Microsoft.
XPS support is being built into new models from all major printer manufacturers. It is lot more modern than PDF/PS and does a better job supporting fancier documents with features like transparencies and gradients. And now apparently its going to be open and standardized as well. It looks like MS nailed this one.
Forcing a reboot to update a file viewer is pure quality and genius.
I hope they die real soon.
I wouldn't say that. The original Adobe reader is horrible in my opinion. But the PDF standard is quite solid and implements a lot of useful features, I think.
Especially the possibilities for inline fonts and ocr'd text using the original font are great.
A dead human acrobat submitted his body?
Someone killed a human acrobat and submitted his body?
The murderer was submitted to some kind of law-enforcement?
That is late at night here, however.
This is what mainstream open-source was clamoring for Microsoft to do... Now Microsoft is standardizing a wide variety of code and documents. So good. Ten years from now when a terabyte database seems kind of small but the information in it is marked up in the as standard a form as ASCII is today then processing huge amounts of information will be as easy as it gets. Once information is standardized then it opens the doors to a wide variety of companies to manipulate the information - in effect providing a "service" to the owner of the database. Open-source, closed, doesn't matter when you have standardized tubes connecting modules and information. A network-centric service economy is probably where we'll go but as Niels Bohr said "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
Shh.
I always wonder what it really means when Microsoft makes "open standards" and such, ever since the MSO XML debacle. I'll wait to hear some details that confirm that there aren't any dirty tricks involved.
Even so, I'm not sure why I would want to jump on this new standard at the moment. PDF is widely supported, and does a good job for the things it's meant for. Will Microsoft make a program to do the things that Acrobat does? Will it provide different ways to optimize quality/size? Will it work with the companies in the print business to make sure it provides everything they need, and works on their equipment on the same level as PDF? Because as much as PDF is nice for trading print documents online, it's real strength is the support from professional printing industries.
So that's what Microsoft needs to do to be on equal footing with Adobe, which still doesn't tell us why anyone should switch.
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Will this one start faster and not bug me every other time I run it to install some random new adobe crap I dont want or need? I the answer to either is yes concider me ready to convert.
The real interesting thing about XML-based file formats is that you can easliy generate files dynamically, especially with technologies like XSLT.
All the "PDF killers" so far have been aimed at the public's perception of PDF: A screen reader that can preserve layouts and print them. But that perception is very outdated. PDF survives because it isn't just a screen reader, it is a defacto standard for CMYK exchange so that print shops can make color-separated output no matter what app generated it. It also can be interactive, with buttons and multimedia. It supports form fields. Everybody thinks Adobe is Photoshop but really, in terms of revenue, Adobe is Acrobat because Acrobat is used more widely in more ways than can be done with these "PDF killers."
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?
I know, XSLT is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's even a functional language!
Hey, it worked great for .NET.
Yeah I'm reading over the specification right now and the color features are pretty extensive. There's support for storing color information in many different color spaces including CMYK.
There's nothing in there for interactivity though, it's strictly a fixed document format.
It's unreasonably hard to generate quality PDF programmatically.
Either you have resort to using the virtual printer driver supplied with Acrobat, or you have to typeset your document to PostScript format using TeX or whatever.
And if you use the virtual printer driver, forget about interactive features and full-text searching.
Editing PDFs is a nightmare - PostScript allows way too much flexibility for a 'portable' format.
I don't know much about XPS, but organizing the document as a set of zipped XML files seems to be a step in the right direction.
What's so horrible about PDF exactly? It's good enough to be used in the OS X graphics system of all places.
Acrobat is horrible, but that has no more to do with PDF than Internet Explorer has to do with HTML.
> XPS support is being built into new models from all major printer manufacturers.
If so it would be a major reason to support XPS. If it is just some crap in the Windows drivers forget it. Just checked HP's site and didn't see it mentioned.
The reason it would be great to get it in printers is that it would force it to be a STANDARD, unlike PDF. MP3 is a standard in that any conforming stream will play on any conforming player. New encoders can be developed but the resulting streams must be playable on ANY player adhering to the original MP3 spec. Adobe never figured that out with PDF, requiring a continual upgrade treadmill to newer readers and adding new features in non backwards compatible ways. Even though some printers DO support a version of PDF, it isn't usable for long after purchase.
If it doesn't get embedded into printers I'd trust Microsoft even less to publish a spec and then stick with it.;
Democrat delenda est
PDF forms are somehow kludgy, but it's a great way to fill in forms you have to print out anyway.
Someone better tell Dick Grayson (Batman's former Robin) about this acrobat killer. It may be the one that killed his parents.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Those that don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Adobe moved from PS (a language) to PDF (a page description language), because making your page description language a programming language has some serious drawbacks.
Procedural generation of content isn't worth the extra hassle of getting programming language style bugs (stack over/underflows, infinite loops, etc) in your documents.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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).
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Look up what XML, XSLT and functional languages are; you're a bit confused as to what's going on here. XPS is a pure page description language with no programming language features. XSLT is a programming language of sorts, which happens to both be composed of XML and process XML, but it is not the page description language.
Really?
Name them.
Seriously, I've been looking. I can't find a reference from any printer maker regarding a model with XPS driver support built in.
You'd think someone other then Microsoft would be at least mentioning this, unless it were just MS blowing hot air, which we know Waggener Edstrom (MS's PR agency) would never do...
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I first heard about PDF in 1995, but it wasn't until around 2000 that software existed to actually do stuff with it.
I still don't do anything in PDF that can't be done in postscript - in fact I still just produce the postscript and only convert to PDF because not many people have heard of postscript.
FoxIt Reader is a great interim solution until this gets standardized. It reads PDF files and opens much faster than Acrobat. I'm not sure why Acrobat reader is so slow, but even the fastest available hardware seems to choke on it.
I see a lot of posts in this discussion that say XPS is better than PDF, because it's XML and human readable and you can manipulate it with XSLT, it's going to be submitted as a standard, etc. That just makes me think: what about SVG? It's already a standard, it's XML, human readable, XSLT, etc.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
for filing a false report.
---southpaw
I would like to recommend against trying to use sliced bread as a programming language.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I know it is fashionable among the Slashdot crowd to discount Acrobat as bloatware. Working as a healthcare professional, however, I really appreciate many of the features geeks may discount as bloat:
:) it has revolutionized the way I archive things. I do not keep copies of print journals anymore. Acrobat runs all the time on my machine.
Virtually all medical papers are available as PDFs. After downloading these, I can annotate them in Acrobat with comments; Acrobat allows me to highlight important passages. I know geeks do not like DRM, but Acrobat's DRM is why some biomedical e-books are available. Thanks to Acrobat, I carry a little library on my 12" Powerbook complete with my own comments/annotations.
While it is true that Acrobat lacks a command-line interface and crashes occasionally
On the contrary, sliced bread makes an excellent stack-oriented language. One just needs to be careful to butter each slice on the correct side.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
PDF is not truly a license free product, open yes, license free - sort of...
This is how Adobe strongarmed MS in removing it from the shipping version of Office, as Adobe was going to demand licensing fees. (However it can be distributed separately without incurring the fees.)
Adobe truly screwed themselves here, they would have been the all time standard with MS giving them full support in Office, but instead they wanted to keep MS at bay and make money off the Office name. Adobe messed up.
From my inside MS sources, the XPS was never meant to become a PDF replacement, even though it has the technology to do so, and even offers more features than the PDF specification. However the move by Adobe to try to screw with MS with the Office Plug-in and taking it even further by raising contention with the whole Vista Composer that is an XAML/XPS technology came as a complete slap to MS.
Prior to Adobe trying to squeeze MS for money and try to stop Vista because of the inherent XPS/XAML composer, MS decided they didn't have to play nice in this market, and I honestly don't blame them.
MS worked with Adobe up until just a few month ago when all of this started coming down. MS even was helping Adobe with using the Vista composer technologies for Adobe products, including their PDF reader. As in MS mind they had no intention of pushing XPS outside of the Vista world which could hurt Adobe, now however with Adobe's actions, they don't feel any obligation to stay out of Adobe's playground and can pursuing opening and dropping XPS technology to all OS platforms.
I have noting against the PDF standard - but when I view PDF files on my Mac, I set up Preview as the default application because, frankly, Preview can open a PDF file an order of magnitude faster. As a simple file-viewer, Acrobat makes PDF's the 2nd to last choice for convenience (with MS Word being the last choice, of course).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I don't get you people. For a group that proclaims their hate for Microsoft as often as they do, slashdotters swear that Microsoft can kill any application and any company. I'm sorry, but even Microsoft has their limitations.
Microsoft is no match for Adobe Acrobat. I guess you can consider Adobe the iPod equivalent of computer software companies. The measuring stick that all image editors are judged buy isn't Microsoft Paint - it's Adobe Photoshop. As far as document formants are concerned, Acrobat is no different. Adobe Acrobat is the one format that anyone even remotely computer literate is familiar with. My sister who has an office job knows what it is. My 15 year old cousin in high school knows what it is. My 51 year old mother even knows what it is. My barely computer literate brother is even familiar with Adobe Acrobat. Like the iPod, Acrobat is bigger than just a file format - it's the name that we all know and love, and it's one of a few cross platform applications that actually make quality, up-to-date Linux versions. Ask any long time Mac user, and they'll quickly tell you that Adobe was vital to keeping their platform afloat (Photoshop, Go Live).
As a matter of fact, we've seen this all before. Apple released a transportation method that was clearly better than it's competitor (USB), and submitted it to a standards committee. But despite all the advantages of Firewire, people had too many legacy applications and were too familiar with USB to abandon one of the few computer elements they were comfortable with. If you add legacy support to my previous reasons, The Microsoft threat isn't as strong as you would like to tell yourself it is.
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.
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.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
If you want to allow your users to do this, instead of adding form fields to your PDF document, it's better to use Word/OpenOffice. Then the user can e.g. cut and paste properly, use rich text markup, and save what he's written in the form on the hard drive (Acrobat may be able to do some of those things now -- I haven't used its form feature in a long time -- but there's a whole pile of problems like this, you get the idea). Not having the form feature would force people to switch to a superior format for these applications.
The problem here is that this allows the user to easily modify the rest of the document, which is not usually what is wanted. When it comes to Word and OpenOffice, then one you have to pay for and the other is not always the nicest thing to use. PDF have a free viewer and anyone can implement one if they wish (spec available). The truth is I just want something that works and allows me to easily share documents with other people, without them having to fork out money in order to view my documents. Format wars only help the people fighting them and eveyone else just ends up being losers.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
That is totally untrue. The entire MEDLINE database, nearly all of Science Web (isiknowledge.com) is PDF. There have been millions of hours spent creating and indexing much our science today in PDF files. There ain't gonna be a quick changeover. Most scientists are inherently conservative about things like this, because not unreasonably, they assume that any new standard is going to screw their previous databases. A large proportion of the publications in this country relies on federal grant money, and both the grants and all that has been published as results are in PDF.
PDF, after over a decade in existence has gained a standard foothold in a wide variety of fields, anybody who believes that there's gonna be a second change in less than that time needs to make a reality check.
That depends... It certainly is an ISO standard but that doesn't make its use standard in certain areas.
In the scientific community it's a de-facto standard. There are no rules to say you must use PDF (to my knowledge), it's just a convenient and useful standard to use so everyone uses it.
That said, the poster who originally said "de-facto" was completely wrong
Apple made a big deal out of "Display PDF" in Mac OS X. However, Display PDF's really just: