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

Word Dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Word Dilution

[BoberFett]

I'm not a murderer, your honor. I simply removed the occupant of that home so a newer, more functional citizen can occupy that dwelling.

I love adobe

[Anonymous Coward]

Forcing a reboot to update a file viewer is pure quality and genius.

I hope they die real soon.

I had to think for a few about this title

[vitalyb]

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.

PDF is too complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

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).

Citation Please

[maggard]

XPS support is being built into new models from all major printer manufacturers.

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...

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.