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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.
http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileforma t/faq/#item-1-8:
pdftohtml
or
pdftk
The last one is more to let you edit a pdf, but they are all really useful when dealing with pdf file.
No, Tamarin is essentially getting Flash's action script engine, whichis EMCA Script 3.0 (I think), and this meaning that Firefox's javascript engine will be able to be replaced (overhauled) with the onen from Flash. The action script engine in flash is much faster and more robust than the one in Firefox currently.
je suis parce que j'aime
1) I think you mean "du jour"
2) <IndigoMantoya>I don't think "du jour" means what you think it means.</IndigoMantoya>
"du jour" simply means "of the day" ("soup du jour" => "soup of the day"). I really don't think you intended to claim that becoming the standard of the day is a good thing. I think saying, "PDF will transition from a de facto standard to an official one" would have been clearer, more succinct, and still gotten your intended point across.
Nathan
It is wonderful to hear that the PDF specification will be the subject of open standardization. Caution should be exercised when implementing products though. Almost 400 patents have been granted to Adobe. Adobe has another 50 patent applications in process. There may also be additional patents that have been assigned to Adobe or that Adobe has an exclusive license to practice. Adobe may also have intellectual property in foreign markets that are greater in scope than what Adobe has in the United States.
Caution should be exercised because ISO does not require that its standards be patent-free. Necessary patents merely must be available on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis. Adobe (or anyone else really) may also seek patents on how PDFs are used, manipulated, etc.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Adobe is bad or that any Open Source Software projects will ever face any obstacles from Adobe. It simply means that some care should be taken to determine whether any of Adobe's patents cover features of the PDF standard or its uses, especially when developing software that mimics an existing proprietary product. If there is a question, then OSS developers should contact Adobe to try to get a license (perhaps for the consideration of a promise that the resulting product remain open source).
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!
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
"PDF has reached a point in it's maturity cycle"
It's == It is. Its == possessive.
"a full blown du jure standard"
Either [soup] "du jour" or [practices] "de jure"?
Can't tell who's responsible for this, the linked page is Slashdotted.
Yes, a 100 MB application to read text seems a bit much. I use Foxit Reader. Just 2 MB, very fast.
Is there any app that can 'uncompile' a pdf and fit it on a screen width?
;-)
No, technical discussions of the format aside.
As an end user, it would help if you consider the format a FINAL format (for viewing, printing, distribution, etc.), and treat the authoring of it as entirely separate. It's really quite obvious, but the modern widespread use of wordprocessing software (which typically combines the two separate steps in an unholy but manageable mess) has led to the confusion. Put another way, your question comes up frequently.
By contrast, those accustomed to separating the two steps (editing text and adding markup, on the one hand, and generating output as postscript, PDF, HTML, formatted text such as man pages, etc., on other), never ask the question and typically scratch their heads when they see it asked. PDFs are typically generated into letter and A4 sizes. Reading them on screen isn't ideal, agreed, but it's unlikely there will ever be a big push for everyone to provide 6x9 or smaller versions. Perhaps one day in the future when screen technology improves and becomes widespread, but not now.
You consolation prize is that you can, with little trouble, extract the text from a PDF. You can use that to re-author a new PDF, or read it as is. But that brings you back full circle to "plain text", doesn't it? The tangential lesson here is there is a reason why *nix users continue to insist on using the command line, and spend much of their time mucking about with text files, and the rest of it arguing about text editors. Text (ascii, if you will), is the lowest common denominator for people and computers. The two get along quite nicely. You could say that processing text is what it's all about. Oddly, enough, computer programs are written in text, and their output is often more text.
There is a book called Unix Text Processing (written by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly) that was first published in 1987. To a large degree, it's as relevant and useful today as it was back then, years before Microsoft released Windows 95 to the world. If you buy a copy on amazon.com (for under $2.00, typically), you can learn how to make your own PDFs and never have to ask the question again.
Quite, which is why things like PDFCreator exist.
"When they open source Photoshop then we will know they support open source strategies.
Actually, Adobe did not open source anything with this move. They opened up the specification for the file format for PDF files. This is still a great move because other companies can now support PDF in both directions (read and write) but it is not open sourcing Acrobat. The equivalent move with regard to Photoshop would be to open up the file specification for the Photoshop work files (some sort of PNGs I believe).
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
AdobeGrl2002: then like u put a 64-byte header blok
ISO_19_TX: thats hot
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
FYI, an Adobe employee responded to some questions about this and especially how it relates to Microsoft's new XPS format here. (Nickull's reply should be at the top of that page)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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).
There are a coupe of things to note in this. With PDF there are lots of free tools to read and write PDFs, as well as a lot of closed tools. With XPS, there is only Microsoft. You claim you have to pay for PDF generation tools, but that is only because you're only considering offerings from one vendor. Worse yet you assume you have not paid for XPS generation tools, when in fact the cost of them is rolled into Windows Vista and MS Office. Even if you don't want XPS and would rather use PDF, you still have to pay if you buy either of these products.
Not only do the creators of PDF's get screwed, the reader software (up until the latest version) has sucked hard.
Yeah, if you only look at one tool, it might be a bad one. So you think it would be better to move to a market where there is only one company that can create said tools, instead of the situation we have now where there are numerous companies creating tools both free and for sale? I suppose if you never look at any other tools, it doesn't matter to you much, huh?
My desktop system is OS X. It has a built in PDF reader that is simple and fast. It can quickly generate PDFs from pretty much any application. MS could have done the same thing with Windows, but they did not. Instead they went with XPS, their own, proprietary, closed competitor. Do you really think that is going to benefit you in the long run?
Why do they need to use AOL Instant Messenger to release it? Couldn't they just set up a Torrent of the spec?
Sent from my iPhone
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.