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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.
Apple relies on Quartz and other built CoreImages to do their PDF rendering. So it works very well under OSX. They'd have to port everything to Windows first. Then you'd end up with a 90 MB "Preview.exe".
See also iTunes and Quicktime in Windows.
Xpdf opens a 114M file in under 2 secs and a 25M one is pretty well instantaneous. Some kind of windose problem no doubt.
While I realize this is supposed to be an amusing turn of phrase, there are actually quite a few tools out there. A few that I like are:
PDFBox - OSS Library for modifying PDFs on the fly.
FOP - Use XSL-FO to design printable page layouts in XML, then use FOP to transform them to PDF documents.
Foxit Tools - Alternative to the overpriced Adobe products.
OpenOffice - The built-in support for PDFs is absolutely wonderful. I rarely give out DOC files anymore.
FPDF - PHP PDF generation tools.
iText - A great library for your own custom PDF generation.
Those are just a few. The PDF format itself is actually not too bad. (When Adobe isn't breaking it with needless revisions, that is.) It's biggest strength is that the psuedo-text nature of the format allows one to diagnose the internals of a file pretty easily. Its greatest weakness is that things like text fields are needlessly convoluted. At the end of the day, though, it's a pretty good format.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Then get Foxit instead.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
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
The whole point of standardization is that it doesn't matter what Adobe does. Anybody can impliment the standard without too much trouble. Though, in practice, it was a DeFacto standard anyway, and there is already a ton of software that supports PDF. I haven't used Adobe's PDF reader in years.
xpdf, kpdf, Preview.app, Foxit Reader, etc. all work and between them probably support damn near any platform you would want to use. I use Foxit on my Windows machines, and I find it to be very convenient software which is fast, light, and mostly stays out of my way.
Actually, he's making a joke about high-speed film (ISO in photography refers to the light-sensitivity of film, as standardized by the ISO council). Film with a high ISO rating is very "fast" which means that it can shoot in very dimly lit situations. 32000 ISO, however, is fucking insane. You could pick up big-bang background noise with that shit!
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
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.
Film with a high ISO rating is very "fast" which means that it can shoot in very dimly lit situations. 32000 ISO, however, is fucking insane. You could pick up big-bang background noise with that shit!
It's not insane, it's just one "f-stop" more sensitive to light than ISO 16000, which is one f-stop more sensitive than ISO 8000. We've already had ISO 6400 film for decades, and right now on the market there are a couple of cameras (like the latest flagship digital SLR from Nikon) with ISO 26500. Yes, that's twenty-six thousand, five hundred. Don't ask me how or why they did it, but they did. Nothing particularly crazy about it, in fact it's a great thing for those who need to use high shutter speeds in low light and/or can't afford ultra-expensive large aperture lenses.
Within ten years we no doubt will be seeing some digital cameras with ISO 32000 or higher sensitivities. Now if they'd just do something about the extremely limited dynamic range...
PDF was never intended to be edited, once published. The objective of the format it that it can be rendered as the author intended, not edited.
So now Americans need to save face. And bashing France at every turn is a way for us to do that. And making it seem like the French hate us is even better, because it justifies our behavior.
The reality on the ground is very different of course. I remember going to Normandie around D-Day 2004, and seeing all the American flags flying. I imagine they were mostly new additions because of the anniversary and Bush's visit, but still it would be hard to imagine an American city being decked out with French flags to celebrate an occasion here. A major street in Caen is still named "Avenue du Six Juin". It was instructive to see the American bluster about France forgetting what we'd done for her, compared to the quiet steadfastness on display there.
-Esme
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.