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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.
RTFA. It's almost a subtle jab at how different the PDF standardization process has been from the OOXML standardization attempt. The PDF process has been straightforward, with no "trickery," and the proponents were actually working to improve the standard and resolve technical problems.
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.
"OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?
Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards."
Because PDF works and can be implemented?
There are many implementations of PDF including commercial and open source ones. They can interoperate with high fidelity. OOXML isn't even implemented according to the specs in MS Office 2007 and there are no other reliable implementations.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
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.
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.
I might also add that the entire point behind the ambiguity in OOXML is to lock users into Microsoft Office. I can use any PDF viewer, because it is a well defined standard, but if the only viewer that displayed PDF's 100% correctly was Adobe's, I'd have to use them. Same idea with OOXML. If 90% of the world uses Microsoft's interpretation of the standard, and I try to use something else, everyone else is going to have trouble with my documents. I'll have to use Microsoft Office, or have people be annoyed with my poorly formed documents.
I'm not anti-Microsoft, I'm just disgusted with this issue.
It's not Apple's fault if Microsoft can't display fonts correctly.
*gets modded down by ignorant Windows users*
Let me count the ways that PDF succeeds:
If OOXML met these criteria, it would stand a fair chance of becoming an accepted standard, too. But Microsoft does not seem to think that meeting these criteria are in its best interests, presumably because that would mean that people could use OOXML without buying licenses to Microsoft products. Microsoft isn't thinking clearly at this time; it is confusing some of the fantasy aspects of its "vision" with the evolving realities of the market it is trying to sell product to.
Yes and no. Thumbnails are not too difficult to support, and can be managed by libraries like PDFBox and iText. The problem is that thumbnails are actually small drawings embedded in the PDF file. Unless you have a PDF renderer handy, they can often be a bit hard to create. Your best bet is to narrow down your choices to your language/platform of choice (e.g. Java, .NET, PHP, whatever), find one of the options that allows you to insert thumbnails, then render the thumbnail in the source program before inserting it into the PDF file. If your program is already graphical, then you shouldn't have too much trouble. If you are creating the PDF more dynamically, then you'll need to get creative. :)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I ask a simple question: How do you re-flow a PDF to fit your browser window? Oh, you can't?
Ummm, I think it's called "Fit Page Width" in Evince. Oh, Reflow? PDF is meant to retain document formatting. It works perfectly for desktop publishing attempts.
Word processing programs aren't for desktop publishing, but most WP programs continue to try to get pixel-perfect formatting. This is the largest complaint I get from reviews of OpenOffice.org -- that it doesn't keep the same exact document formatting that the MS Word version of the document had. The mentality confuses me no end.
Lyx and pdflatex all the way, babe!
Put identity in the browser.
We already have an ISO standard for office documents. It's called ODF. Sorry, Microsoft you showed up too late for this fight, like you did a few times in the past. We don't need another office document standard, please start supporting ODF or else just fuck off.
If Microsoft bundles software with its products and/or integrates new features, other companies like Adobe, Netscape or Realmedia often fear that they will sell fewer of their products. Unfortunately, this means that Microsoft products often can't have features other operating systems or office packages have (PDF export, a decent web browser,
Claus
Claus