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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.
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.
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.
On Mac OS every print dialog has an option to print to PDF instead of the printer. Very Handy!