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Adobe To Release Full PDF Specification to ISO
nickull writes "Adobe announced it will release the entire PDF specification (current version 1.7 ) to the International Standards Organization (ISO) via AIIM. PDF has reached a point in its maturity cycle where maintaining it in an open standards manner is the next logical step in evolution. Not only does this reinforce Adobe's commitment to open standards (see also my earlier blog on the release of flash runtime code to the Tamarin open source project at Sourceforge), but it demonstrates that open standards and open source strategies are really becoming a mainstream concept in the software industry.
So what does this really mean? Most people know that PDF is already a standard so why do this now? This event is very subtle yet very significant. PDF will go from being an open standard/specification and de facto standard to a full blown de jure standard. The difference will not affect implementers much given PDF has been a published open standard for years. There are some important distinctions however. First — others will have a clearly documented process for contributing to the future of the PDF specification. That process also clearly documents the path for others to contribute their own Intellectual property for consideration in future versions of the standard. Perhaps Adobe could have set up some open standards process within the company but this would be merely duplicating the open standards process, which we felt was the proper home for PDF. Second, it helps cement the full PDF specification as the umbrella specification for all the other PDF standards under the ISO umbrella such as PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/E. The move also helps realize the dreams of a fully open web as the web evolves (what some are calling Web 2.0), built upon truly open standards, technologies and protocols."
Is this a nail in the MS XML coffin?
I tip my hat to them.
I don't know that this move has more meaning today than if it was done two years ago, but I certainly see more motivation today. The purpose of the ODF is to ensure that 100 years from now we can still access data. Closed formats mean data may not be accessible in the future. PDF used to be the sole means to have a document look exactly the same across any platform. That is no longer the case, and even Microsoft has opened the standard (mostly) on their new Office data files.
While I still applaud the effort, Adobe is late to the party.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Translation for mere mortals: Adobe is feeling the breath of Microsoft and its Metro. They are so scared to become the next Netscape they are trying to nil any reason people may have to use Microsoft's XPS.
PDF was never a standard in the sense of the word that one was encouraged to use it. Only open standards meet that requirement.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Adobe have deservedly copped criticism over the years, but one great thing they've shown by example is that if you *do* let go out of specs (as they did with PDF), you can still be a viable business. More than viable. Adobe is still the #1 name in PDF/PS, but they do so alongside competitors (GhostScript/View and the zillion PDF generation tools). Yet Adobe is still making money.
0 000000057.html Beyond [PageUp/PageDown], Adobe Reader's interface is very badly designed. The preferences make me weep and why can't I bookmark a la Visual Studio? And please stop trying to stuff every scripting concept known to humanity into the PDF spec, because all you're doing is turning PDF into the ultimate Trojan vector! Had to get that off my chest...)
;-)
Compare that to Sun with Java. Sun just wouldn't let go, so it never got beyond being just another product that competitors had to *take down!* One of those was Microsoft, but they themselves made the same mistake with Microsoft Word. Remember how DOC files used to be the "standard" (cough) for distributing documents on the web? Now it's all either PDF or HTML. If MS had let go, maybe, people would have used that?** In the long run, when we're talking about data which *needs* to be interchangable and not tied to one software vendor, an open spec will win. Especially a better one! (PDFs look the same. Word DOCs don't!)
(Reading this and feeling good Adobe? *great*. Now please head on over to Joel and learn about user interface design http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog
Anyway, PDF and PS still rock and I'm glad they won!
** = Yes, Microsoft did make a feint with their Office XML, but everyone recognizes it for the debacle it is. Sorry Dad!
I know that I can print to XPS right now, but I can't print to PDF without paying 300 bones (standard edition) or 449 (professional).
It's not that people don't think of PDF as a standard - it's that it's insanely expensive to have as a "feature".
I mean seriously, think about it - you can buy a "normal" version of Office for the price of being able to export your documents to a PDF. Arguably the utility of Office applications is significantly higher than the ability to ship PDF's around.
It is also very clear from Adobe's pricing that they have you by the balls. Distiller isn't worth that much.
Not only do the creators of PDF's get screwed, the reader software (up until the latest version) has sucked hard. It had a tendency to stay open and use copious amounts of RAM even whenthere were no PDF docs being viewed. Performance wasn't really what they were after either and the ads in Reader were pretty awful too.
There is no reason that it needs to cost so much to create non-editable documents.
There can be no doubt or argument that there should be only one open standard. Open meaning not owned by any entity or for-profit company. Ideally the standard should be specified and updated on behalf of all the consumers or all the people by the government or an institute chartered by it. The Standard specifying body should be completely neutral and agnostic. It should allow all players, big and small, for profit and non-profit, commercial and non commercial a level playing field. Such is the case with your nuts and bolts (SAE and DIN spec) or your engine oil or light bulbs or extension cords or ASCII encoding (not EBCDIE if any remembers that) and ANSI language specs.
Open Source, one can debate, one can agree to various extent the usefulness or the lack of it. Pros and cons you can disagree with me. As long as neither you nor I control the standards, it is a level playing field and the market and history will prove either you or me as correct. Same with free software.
Currently there are three standards being specified. Which itself is bad. OpenDoc, a microsoft thingie called OpenXML and now the OpenPDF. I like OpenXML least because it pretends to be a standard but it cant be implemented by all players without help/license from Microsoft. It has the audaucity to enshrine bugs of Office97 and Word6 and WordPerfect5 as standards . OpenDoc is already well on its way in the standards process. PDF has a much wider user installed base and has a financial muscle of a decent profit making company and its self interest. I wish PDF and OpenDoc will merge and come up with a unified standard.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Have you actually looked at a PDF file in a text editor? It's a meaningless pile of spaghetti.
What you mean is that it's not human-readable. And it's not designed to be -- what's the point of that? It's not going to be human-writable or human-editable.
And it's plain, readable XML instead of a 25-year-old printer description language.
XML is a subset of a 40-year-old markup language. XML has become the ultimate cancer on computing -- it's this seductive hammer that makes everything look like a nail, and when the first round of XML doesn't quite solve the problem, the solution is to throw on a little *more* XML.
XML is wastefully large, so all XML formats have to be compressed to be at all competetive in terms of file size.
XML is totally un-indexable, so you can't let any single XML document grow too big (because you always have to parse from the start to get the data you really want). So XML formats often have to break up their data into multiple XML files, and then make the "file format" a zip archive of various XML documents sprinkled around.
Your applicaiton can build files using any XML parsing engine, instead of having to license a PDF library.
Do you have any idea how miniscule a part of PDF *or* XPS functionality consists of parsing? One chapter (~130 pages) of the PDF spec covers syntax. The remaining 7 chapters (~650 pages) deal with how to interpret and render what you've parsed.
That XML library you use to read/write XPS files is going to be pretty useless on its own, unless you're also using a library that specifically knows the XPS format.
No, it was gblues, a commenter about three levels up from this comment, who said "I think you mean 'du jour'". You can stop talking in bold font now.