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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.
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.
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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.
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.
I don't know about you but Adobe Reader 8 is quite a bit better than the previous versions (loads incredibly fast now).
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.
Do any of the products you listed allow generation of PDFs with thumbnails? Specifically, I recently had a problem where a client requested a PDF on their website which would open with thumbnails down the left. I did Google for the answer but it _seemed_ only Adobe software would do this?
You could do a pdf to jpg for each page, then a resize to thumbnail. You'd want to cache the thumbnails, but if your pdfs aren't changing much, there's not too much overhead.
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.
Dude, I'm French, I live in France, and not only do I not have an opinion on whether or not proprietary software becoming an ISO standard is bad, but I don't know anyone here or matter of fact anywhere who would have an opinion on this or even hear about such a process.
Where on Earth do you find your Frenchmen? And why on Earth do you all act like we're all behind this vote? We've got riots and strikes going on, but wait, PDF is about to become an ISO standard! Let's all stop burning cars to prevent this from happening! Merde, too late! What will become of us!?!
You just got troll'd!
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.
If that was the case, that is France and Europeans in general really loved the USA they would have supported us with the various wars against the ARABS.
You know what's wrong with you? Your problem is that you seem to think that "arab" is an acronym. It's not.
Both of your respective communities seem to be into complete denial about what the rest of the world is like, what personal responsibility is, what it is to respect people from different culture than yours and frankly have a huge disregard for life.
Hey, no fair! That's OUR arguments against Americans, you can't use them against us! Make up your own!
You just got troll'd!
On Mac OS every print dialog has an option to print to PDF instead of the printer. Very Handy!
Hard to believe no one has mentioned PDFCreator. An excellent option for end users, it will interface with any windows program which supports printing. Open source, lightweight and very handy.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
My other OS is the MCP!