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PDF Is Now ISO 32000
It is official. As PDF Architect Jim King blogged today, Adobe has received word that the ballot for approval of PDF 1.7 to become the ISO 32000 Standard (DIS) has passed by a vote of 13 positive to 1 negative. A two-thirds majority is required to pass so it was a large margin of victory (93%). The vote breaks down as follows: Countries voting positive with no comments (9): Australia, Bulgaria, China, Japan, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine. Countries voting positive with comments (4): UK (13 comments), USA (125), Germany (11), Switzerland (19). Countries voting negative with comments (1): France (37 comments). Countries abstaining (1): Russia.
So where can I download an ISO of PDF tools?
We should rename the application "Freedom Bat Reader", to protest their no vote.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
So when will ps2pdf17 be released?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I don't suppose there's a link anywhere to read the comments, especially those of the lone dissenting country? I'm curious as to their reasoning.
Apple's QuickView and Preview app does a much nicer job of viewing PDFs. Adobe should totally get Apple to build their PDF viewer.
Another standard from our friends the ISO. I'm glad the .pdf is now a documented standard, but this doesn't really mean TOO much in the document world. It might convince a few pointy-haired bosses that .pdf is MUCH better than develpoing some internal document handling protocol due to the imposing and convincing sound the standard makes when spoken, but I know that most of the ISO standardization process is in name only.
Let's not get started about process and quality management and the yellow sticky of approval that is ISO-9000.
But then again, I know many French people, and they're opposed to proprietary software becoming an ISO standard, especially with patent and copyright as it stands now here in the US.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Great, now just make a reader that doesn't slow my system down to a crawl while opening a 100K document.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I dunno much, but ISO 32000 ought to be able to record photos in the very darkest of dark places.
It's too bad they'll be saved as PDFs, I prefer to shoot RAW.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
looks like that in january they were starting to do this, acording to an article in computerworld.
they said it would took from one to three years, so it looks like it was an easy decision.
they also say that adobe has had ISO standards for pdf a long time now, and suggests that it could have something to do with file-type standardization.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9009366/
What does a format being standardized have to do with the applications that read and write them? Perhaps I'm not as sensitive to this, since it's really easy to generate PDFs from all applications on MacOS X, but I don't see why Adobe should release their software for free any more than I think Dreamweaver should be free in order for HTML to be a standard.
E pluribus unum
I don't see him comparing document sizes or anything like - he literally complained that the reader slows down his system.
I guess PNG shouldn't be a standard either because you can't get Photoshop for free and IE screws up its transparency.
(No, I don't know if PNG actually is an ISO standard. If it isn't, pretty please don't ruin my analogy by pointing out facts.)
but until the full version of Adobe is available for free, or even less expensive, to the masses, it seems to be not quite right
Why does the full version of Adobe need to be free? There's many free utilities that create PDFs, there's multiple free APIs to manipulate PDFs. There's plenty of free, open source readers. What is it about the full version of Acrobat that's so special?
AccountKiller
Russia:
"After long internal deliberation, we have arrived at an official position. We don't give a shit."
Is that with or without the new PDF ad scheme? I wonder how many other ISO standards have a clickable ad in the document as part of it's specifications. Is that a coincidence or what? Less than a month after they reveal the ad specs they are an ISO standard! What a racket!
Umm, what isn't portable about PDFs?
I'll grant that it has it's uses but until the full version of Adobe is available for free, or even less expensive, to the masses, it seems to be not quite right.First, I assume you're talking about Adobe Acrobat, since Adobe is a company, not a product. The whole point of standards is that they do not rely upon any given implementation and anyone and everyone can make their own. Don't like Adobe's free product, get someone else's. I have both free and payware PDF tools from both Adobe and other companies. Do you want better free PDF tools, go ahead and code them, the standard is right there and the licensing to the patents is free. Heck there's even good set of GPL PDF libraries and code from the XPDF project.
I'd also certainly rather have a format that is a lot less file size intensive.You can make pretty small PDFs, depending upon what you put in them. Or, if you want smaller file sizes and are willing to sacrifice features, use postscript, it's been a standard for a long time.
To all mail users...no, you can't keep all of those emails with pdf's in your inbox without going over your quota.Mail quotas are so mid 90s. Disk space is cheap and so long as you're not using Exchange (which insists on keeping sometimes hundreds of versions of the same file around, since it is too stupid to just keep one copy for everyone) it is not like attachments are much of an issue anymore.
It's sad that PDF, which seems like a pretty good format to me, has earned such a poor reputation. It has nothing to do with the format, rather, it has everything to do with the shitty software Adobe has put out to read PDFs. Sure, recent versions of Reader have improved loading time, and there are alternative packages available for reading, but the precedent was set around the time Reader 6 or 7 came out, as PDF usage was exploding. I grimmace everytime I see a link to a PDF on my Windows machine or on a Solaris workstation. Both have Reader installed, and it is a truly shitty piece of software: the load time is far too long (even with the latest improvements), it has embedded ads, the interface doesn't match the platform's Look & Feel well... the list goes on. Adobe could do a lot to spur the popularity of PDF by releasing a really high quality reader... but the damage may have already been too great.
Number could have been better. Should have been ISO 32768. And the OSS implementations could have been called 32Kib. So close, yet so far.
--Shemnon
"Umm, what isn't portable about PDFs?"
Uh, large file size?
"First, I assume you're talking about Adobe Acrobat, since Adobe is a company, not a product. The whole point of standards is that they do not rely upon any given implementation and anyone and everyone can make their own. Don't like Adobe's free product, get someone else's. I have both free and payware PDF tools from both Adobe and other companies. Do you want better free PDF tools, go ahead and code them, the standard is right there and the licensing to the patents is free. Heck there's even good set of GPL PDF libraries and code from the XPDF project.
You can make pretty small PDFs, depending upon what you put in them. Or, if you want smaller file sizes and are willing to sacrifice features, use postscript, it's been a standard for a long time."
I guess I should been more specific. While there are other options than Adobe and you can make pretty small pdf files, most Windows users are ignorant of those options. And, Adobe's free product is a viewer. It does not give you the ability to create. Have you ever been to a local, state, or government site that has documents available in pdf? Why should a two page text file be two megabytes? Why should a fifty page legal brief be fifteen megabytes? Portable my ass unless you are one of the tech savvy.
"Mail quotas are so mid 90s. Disk space is cheap and so long as you're not using Exchange (which insists on keeping sometimes hundreds of versions of the same file around, since it is too stupid to just keep one copy for everyone) it is not like attachments are much of an issue anymore."
Hmm... Work much in very large organizations? Mail quotas are a fact. And while we're at it, Exchange allows users on the same mail store to have a single instance of an attachment available to all users who received the email until the last user deletes the email.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Can someone please explain to me what this means?
What this means is that you now have to correct your website and where it says "Download document as PDF" change it to "Download document in ISO3200 standard," or risk the ISO sending the monkeys out from castle to get you!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
32000 even
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I don't know about you but Adobe Reader 8 is quite a bit better than the previous versions (loads incredibly fast now).
The ignorance of Windows users isn't a reason to fight PDF, it is a reason to educate the users and force Microsoft to support a format that others OSes have for years.
"The whole point of an open standard is that you're not locked into buying Acrobat (which I assume is what you meant by 'Adobe'). There are a bajillion and one PDF creators out there, many of them free. OS X can print to PDFs out-of-the-box."
:)
Of course, Acrobat is what I meant when I said Adobe. Looking from a Windows centric support view I guess I assumed that was a given. From the same Windows centric support view... duh?, what's OS X? While you and I, and many others know there are other options, your typical Windows user (read majority) have no clue that you can even create a pdf in anything other than Adobe (Acrobat).
"The puppy typed 'Adobe' at the moment you were trying to type 'Acrobat'?"
The puppy says, "Fruck roo, go rinux".
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
"The ignorance of Windows users isn't a reason to fight PDF, it is a reason to educate the users and force Microsoft to support a format that others OSes have for years."
I can't argue that point in any way, shape, or form. However, if we could force education upon the users they wouldn't use MS in first place. I have no desire to fight PDF, only the desire for PDF creators to get a clue.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Firefox?
The "Firefox Update" page is virtually my home page these days with the number of vital updates I need to be made aware of...
I don't know what the grandparent meant, but I personally have had no luck getting tabular data back out of PDF documents after trying several of the tools out there. So, while PDF is portable in the "read it anyplace" sense, it's not very portable in the "doing something programatically with the contents" sense :-(
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
But I guess that means it's curtains (Windows, get it?) for Microsoft's PDF killer, XPS. Kill Google? Backatcha, Steve-o!
These problems aren't native to the format. A 2 page text document can easily be 2meg if it's scanned at 600dpi and no OCR is applied.this particular problem relates only to the knowledge of the user, and in that regard i don't think anyone can solve all the problems. While we're at it, you already knew this.
btw, your point on Acrobat Pro is moot, since there have been free PDF authoring tools available for years now, and publicly available export classes and functions for a variety of languages.. I could write a 3 line app that outputs passable (sparse, perhaps, but passable) PDFs. That's the benefit of having an open standard, anyone can implement a product using it.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads/
The whole reader is 2.2mb, Adobe's is more than 10 times that and foxit still has the same functionality!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I have full ebooks with 200+ pages and lots of photographs and diagrams. 400-600K
That seems pretty decent.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Intellectually bankrupt loser.
Tables actually read pretty well, if you use something that will read the text section breaks back to you -- tabular data is commonly inserted with each cell as a different text area, because it makes alignment easy. That makes straight string extraction difficult from something like a PDF->TXT rendering engine, as the cells just run together in each row. But a PDF parsing library, like PDFKit (various versions are available for GNUStep, .NET, and as part of Cocoa) or the like can go a long way toward helping you get delimited text out of a PDF.
ISO/IEC 15948:2003
"Don't lose your mind trying to set it free..."
This isn't the document format's fault. People doing stupid things with PDF's would do things just as stupidly in any other format. I know a lot of those government PDF's are apparently made by somebody grabbing a copy of whatever document they need as a PDF, scanning it in, and calling it a day. The result is that you just have high resolution images of each page. Yes, that results in a large file size, but there really isn't any document format where a user is incapable of doing something similar. Maybe if scanning programs defaulted to trying to OCR scanned images, or had a lower default resolution, more of the PDF's you run across would be smaller, but that is a tool issue, not a format issue.
I ask a simple question: How do you re-flow a PDF to fit your browser window? Oh, you can't?
PDF is just PostScript Deluxe. It's meant for *printed* presentations - not for general document interchange. It's presentation layer only - no document model under the hood. It's so broken, so wrongheaded, and so last century, I hardly know where to begin.
At least OOXML supports a structured document model.
Uh, large file size?
[snip]
I guess I should been more specific. While there are other options than Adobe and you can make pretty small pdf files, most Windows users are ignorant of those options. And, Adobe's free product is a viewer. It does not give you the ability to create. Have you ever been to a local, state, or government site that has documents available in pdf? Why should a two page text file be two megabytes? Why should a fifty page legal brief be fifteen megabytes? Portable my ass unless you are one of the tech savvy. Perhaps a two page file taking two megabytes is a scanned file? Thus making it quite a large bitmap graphic? A lot of pdf files out there are scanned documents. They are big. I just created a four page text file from openoffice that weighed in at 69kb. I've done much of the same in windows using acrobat. Mostly, in my experience, pdfs end up being smaller than the source docs they come from. Using the default options.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
What a useless format, it's not even in XML.
The big one is of course forms. Do any other PDF creators create PDFs with forms? Do they do it well?
I use cutePDFcreator, Foxit, and a few others but they are missing the ability to create forms. Some do it; none do it well, IMO. Without forms it's just a static document. PDF is overkill for just a portable static document. The full version of Adobe Acrobat is fantastic at creating forms. That is what makes it so special.
The Russians are waiting for PDF to vote for THEM...
End Program - Adobe Acrobat
Ending Program... Please wait.
End Program - Adobe Acrobat
This program is not responding.
AcroRd32.exe: The only program in the known universe which can thwart a "kill" signal from both user logoff and system shutdown.
PS: Parent is heavy favorite for "Post of the Year" honors.
Well, mostly; and, yes, I'm a bit of a whiner, and, I'm told, a douchbag too (whatever one of those is), but I think I'm right on this one!
The reason I hate pdf is that some companies tend to use it instead of plain html. Nokia, for example, use it on their Forum Nokia web site for pretty much everything, when plain html (plus a bit of css, perhaps) would do just fine. Perhaps they could supply the pdf as well for people who want to collect out-of-date copies (or want to view them offline or print them).
Max.
F*ckin' France
Get foxit pdf reader. It is 1/100th the size of adobe and 10 times faster. Adobe sucks!
Do not anger the worm.
Windows printer driver that outputs PDFs from any windows program that can print.Very handy.
(I do agree with what zombie said though. Making PDF forms basically blows outside of Adobe products)
Professional photography jokes, what a riot. Personally I would have gone for the cheap blind date advertisement joke... you know, "PDF is ISO 32000 ... likes tango dancing, long walks on the beach, and platform-independent compression of digital documents..."
This is very interesting considering I just heard about http://gnupdf.org/Goals_and_Motivations today. As I understand this project will allow editing of pdfs, a feature which is lacking in current FOSS pdf tools.
-Brandon
Quitters never win, Winners never quit, But those who never win and never quit are idiots.
I don't have time to RTFA before I go to work, but perhaps someone could answer these questions for everyone's benefit:
1. Is this the kind of standard that everybody can implement, or the kind of standard that will be used by PDF proponents to wave under the boss's nose and say "it's a Standard!" to get their format used over other (perhaps more open) formats?
2. Does the standard extend to all the extra that are in Acrobat Reader but not in most other PDF readers (forms, annotations, etc.)? In my experience, PDF works fine as a print representation of a document, but some people love to use it for forms that have to be filled out, or for attaching comments to a document you sent them, and this currently causes interoperability problems.
3. Why did France vote against?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
ARTHUR:
If you will not show us the Grail, we shall take your castle by force!
FRENCH GUARD:
You don't frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly English k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!
GALAHAD:
What a strange person.
ARTHUR:
Now look here, my good man--
FRENCH GUARD:
I don't wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
GALAHAD:
Is there someone else up there we could talk to?
FRENCH GUARD:
No. Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a!
[sniff]
ARTHUR:
Now, this is your last chance. I've been more than reasonable.
15 mmegabytes? Where the hell are you getting your numbers.
I just made a randomly generated pdf using a Lorum Ipsum generator and copy and paste.
278 page, 1.1 MB. Looks the same on my Mac as it does on a Linux machine as it does on Windows machine as it does on a reader that supports PDF as it does on the printer.
That's why.
PDF is a nice format, but they need to slim down the reader, and utilize its now aquired flash format. Macromedia was working on Flashpaper before Adobe aquired them and it was a pretty cool idea. Opening a flashpaper file was a snap and you could embed them in your web page if needed.
Yeah, well, that pretty much was the joke. Thank you for pointing out the terribly obvious film reference. You must be a hoot to watch something like Family Guy with.
Was it Microsoft introducing 125 remarks on behalf of the US?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
From your list ...
My response is either Don't care, Don't need it, or why is that part of PDF?
Most people do not write PDF documents, they write documents and turn them into PDFs to distribute them
So Spell checking, import, export etc. is done in a better document writer?
And about Forms, sorry never used them, don't see the point, it's not what a PDF is about a PDF *IS* a static document to me?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
The French would've surrendered eventually.
Isn't PostScript better if you simply need a container for printing and viewing? Forms are used by all large HR departments, non-profit orgs, the IRS, and grant organizations (like endowment for the arts). Adobe reader also has a corner on being able to fill the forms compared to other readers. Don't get me wrong, I dispise Acrobat. I would much rather use PS, but it doesn't have nearly the flexability.
In Soviet Russia, ISO standard becomes PDF!!!!!
Actually, that would work. It becomes a PDF so people could read it.
Have we found an "in Soviet Russia" joke that doesn't work?
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
> Because PDF works and can be implemented?
Are there any free software that can edit a PDF document?
Excellent. Now can we have a reader that lets me save a bookmark so I can come back to the same place later? I can't believe that nobody else wants to do that?
I did have some Javascript from an O'Reilly book that worked in an earlier version of Adobe Reader but it's broken in the latest version. Foxit Reader 2.2 doesn't seem to have this feature. Are there any others?
I wish my SLR did ISO32000
See my journal, I write things there
Wasn't PDF originally a subset of PostScript, designed less functionality?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
OpenOffice.org allows you to create PDF with forms.
Evince and other popper depencies now support filling forms and saving them as PDFs.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Well, I couldn't agree more.
PDF is just a good wrapping for postscript.
I actually use it very often to transfer engiiner and civil drawings to partners that don't have autocad. I say it works very nice. And I also use it when I go to the printing center to print it on A1 or A0 paper.
Won't somebody think of the children?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
The standard for infusing tea serves as the way to judge quality for the purpose of international trade. Long before computers were invented, people produced and traded tea. It's still a big business, which means there are big contracts involving large amounts of money, and there are gonna be disputes over quality and so on. ISO provides a standardized way to estimate this quality so the disputes can be resolved fairly. That's the point of the organization.
Besides, PS has no equivalent to PDF/A, for archival.
That said, I agree with the PP that forms are an interesting, but not a crucial matter for PDF. PDF got its dominant role in the print industry not for forms, but for "doing PS the right way".
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Just curious, is Monty Python the genuine originator of the phrase "I fart in your general direction?"
So how do you get a round number ISO standard, instead of waiting in line and getting ISO13487 or somesuch? Who do you need to persuade?
Someone must have thought that ISO9000 and ISO32000 are going to be referenced often enough that they deserve easy-to-remember "vanity" numbers.
Or are they just going to tack three zeros onto each standard number from now: ISO33000, ISO34000, ISO35000, etc?
Paid Q&A/Research
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and_extinguish
If this were Fark, I'd give them a big "You're doing it wrong". Microsoft has gotten so bold that they they have done the extend first by creating a "standard" that nobody can implement, now they are in the embrace stage (although it's the other way around) trying to get the world to accept it as an open standard (hard to type that without laughing). If that ever goes through, you can bet that ODF will be the target and possibly the victim of the Extinguish.
They've got balls, I'll give them that. Or maybe it's just that they have chairs?
Thats right , leave it to the french to always be the ones complaining....
vive la paix mes estit grenouille!
all I know is that Scribus can create PDF forms.
Very true. Another reason PDF has a bad rap is because people use it for things which it's not at all intended for. For instance, at my university, it seems like word-processed documents given to students to print out etc. are generally .DOC (where PDF would be ideal) while scanned-in documents are always in huge, bloated, and slow PDFs (where DejaVu would be ideal and any decent image format would be better than PDF).
I have been waiting to read a mountain of PDF's. I like every other sane person refuses to use anything that hasn't got an ISO stamp.
Now if only firefox can get an ISO standard I will be able to go to no websites.
Does IE still screw up PNG transparency? all these years later? and people still use it?
What is PDF (as an ISO standard) supposed to accomplish? Wasn't HTML created specifically as a document sharing protocol? I think it's pretty good stuff. Why not use HTML? The fact that PDF is read-only annoys me to no end. There are always clips of documents that I want to save/remember. I can quickly edit a saved HTML file to remove images or pages that I don't want on my hard drive taking up space. And this new standard... does it allow the new ads in PDF that I've been hearing about? *shudder*
There is also http://www.reportlab.org/ and open-source incarnations of RML (OpenRML and TinyRML). This is Python library, but works with Java via Jython.
Anyone think maybe Russia abstained as a cheeky protest against the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov in 2001? Seeing it's an Adobe product, and PDF in particular.
He was arrested by the FBI in the US for DMCA Violation (which does not apply in Russia obviously), after Adobe complained about his production of AEBR for ElcomSoft, which cracks PDF passwords. No violation was committed on US soil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Sklyarov
The real problem with PS and one of the reasons for the simplification that is PDF is that PS is a Turing complete language. This means that one can do some pretty cool things like a Koch snowflake in a couple of lines, but it also means that some simple things (like counting the pages in a document) can be impossible to do fast. So PDF trimmed down all the programming features and added some stuff like forms, support for different image formats and faster access to information that enable renderers to do a better more modern job. So, in fact, PostScript has too much flexibility.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
Openoffice, Scribus and pdftex can all create pdf forms. In pdftex it is incredibly easy, creating a pdf form with some 200 or 300 fields in it is a snap.
Scribus and psftex will also let you insert javascript in the pdf file, I am not sure about openoffice, I try to avoid that piece of software as much as I can.
Digital signing and encryption is a problem. Pdftex used to implement encryption, but they took it out. What makes me mad is that adobe reader is a crippleware, it can do annotations and simple editing in a pdf document, but artificially restrict this capability to documents that are digitally signed in a special way, and there is no free tool that would do that.
AccountKiller
One of my team mates at work calls it "Pretty Dumb File", probably with justification - you can do nothing else with it but for view and print it (Duh).
I guess it is one format I get to use quite a lot, anyway.
It's easy to create PDFs, but I have yet to find a piece of software that can import PDF and export it to another format without significant changes or random information loss. Has anyone had positive experience in this area?
The PDF specification is being approved by subcommittee 2 of technical committee 171. It has nothing to do with JTC1 and surely has nothing to do with SC34 of JTC1.
It's one thing for the average person to have no idea how ISO or IEC works, and to think the OOXML issue affects all of ISO, and to have no idea that IEC is just as affected by the OOXML issue as ISO is, but any respectable journalist should do some research and try to understand what they're reporting on.
The Inquirer should be ashamed to be associated with such bad reporting.
Use dvips -Ppdf then ps2pdf
The results ass as good as dvipdf, and you get to use eps files, pstricks, etc. It's a bit slower, though.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Well, IE 6 does, which is still the most popular browser.
You'll probably want to get a helper app for viewing docs from the above site, too. (And there are other front-ends, like KPDF.)
I wouldn't call it a document format so much as a graphics format. The design is much more oriented towards typesetting and layout for printers than electronic data exchange. It's allowable and actually fairly common for PDFs to contain only a set of (font) graphics and their locations on the page, with no reverse mapping to figure out what letters the font graphics represent. The only way to get data back out is for a human or OCR to read it. This was actually my job function for a significant part of 2005.
For great justice.
...so long as you're not using Exchange... And which companies would that be?For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Most of them, since according to Gartner's last report, MS Exchange was in second place behind IBM's Lotus in worldwide market share.
> approval of PDF 1.7 to become the ISO 32000 Standard (DIS) has passed by a vote of
.pdf? >:(
> 13 positive to 1 negative.
"32000" is a nice, round number. Couldn't they use it for something more special than
> by a vote of 13 positive to 1 negative. A two-thirds majority is required to pass
> so it was a large margin of victory (93%)
Too bad normal laws aren't passed by a 90% supermajority.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"Intellectually bankrupt loser."
Ahh...coming from an anonymous coward, that would make you a karma-worried rectal orifice of tremendous proportion. Don't want to openly criticize in order to save said karma? There, I replied without worry to karma, feel better?
I accepted responsibility for not stating that I was coming from a non-Slashdot accepted position...Windows centric support. PDF's from the masses = grief. So now I say, mange, merde, et morte.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
"The EU distribute their directives and regulations in html and pdf forms. I have seen smaller documents at 58KB (6 pages) and much larger documents with a hundred plus pages. However it still usually remains less than half a meg. I only have found reports to get really large and that because of graphics. My only gripe is that they should bookmark better for navigation (both html and pdf)."
Great, please, please, get your EU folks to educate the idiots here in the USA.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
I agree with your post in its entirety. However..."Maybe if scanning programs defaulted to trying to OCR scanned images, or had a lower default resolution, more of the PDF's you run across would be smaller, but that is a tool issue, not a format issue."
My obviously not well stated point is that the lowest common denominator (Windows end user) doesn't even begin to comprehend the tool much less the format. That's why I see so many ungodly large PDF files.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Someone was telling me that they even use SGML in the EU which is what makes their absence of navigation markers so annoying!
See my journal, I write things there
Text, especially repetitive text like your lorem ipsum, is highly compressible. PDF is (optionally, at least) partially compressed; this is why PDFs are usually a bit bigger than their ps.gz equivalents, and no-where near as big as the raw PS.
Look out!
PDF was designed to make it easy to send people documents that are often intended to be printed. You see, the other common method of sending stuff to publishers is very tedious (at least a few years ago): you had a file such as an Adobe Illustrator or Quark Express file, you also had all the separate image files for any images that you used in the document, and then there were the fonts. You can't really send this group of files to anyone but another person in the prepress industry, because only they would know how to open it and have everything appear as it should. Acrobat meant that people could take a document and its collection of files, and pop it all into a nice file that will look right to whoever they send it to, whether that be a big publishing house, or some customer just wanting to print off a copy on their laserjet.
As for the huge file sizes for PDFs with not much in them, that is often just a case of someone not knowing how to create a proper PDF, or being lazy, etc. Can hardly blame Adobe for such stupidities as embedding huge images of scanned text, for instance. PDFs weren't really designed with small files sizes in mind, but that doesn't mean a person who knows what they are doing can't make a lean PDF if required.
Like many things, the PDF is just a tool, and a tool is only as efficient as the person using it.