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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
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.
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.
I like Foxit on Windows machines. Incredibly small and lightweight and works in your browser.
Adobe ain't too happy with Apple right now, seeing as how there's no 64bit Carbon.
This will probably help. the filenames are all for windows, but the idea is the same. Just go to "Show package contents" int he contextual menu to get to the folders he is talking about. Makes acrobat run much faster. I also prefer some of the features of acrobat.
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
Knowing Apple though, it will be great on OS X (wait, they already have Preview), it will suck on Windows, and it won't be available for other platforms.
What really should happen is that another developer should make a kick ass open source cross-platform PDF viewer (AND editor for annotations, cropping, combining, extracting, converting, etc).
Unfortunately though, there are already those alternatives out there, but they mostly suck worse than Acrobat/Reader.
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
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.
"totally" is like, so bitchin' dude. I mean, like, peeps should go tubular and stop being so bogus 90s. Righteous call, bro. Gnarly. I mean, those cats are like...whatEVER!
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.
Plus it'd disregard all Windows conventions, and implement it's own jarringly out-of-place antialiasing. See Safari/Win32.
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.
Based on QT4, okular might fill that gap.
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
NOOOOO!!! please not another upgrade. It nags me three weeks before an upgrade. NO, I DONT WANT TO FUCKING UPGRADE!!! And three weeks after an upgrade. I ALREADY FUCKING UPGRADED IT!!! Then it resets all my file extension defaults and starts opening everything in Acrobat Reader 8 even though I've told it a million times to open with Acrobat Pro 5. Fucking piece of shit must die.
Note to Acrobat developers, if anyone asks what you do, lie. It could be me. I will fucking kill you and then skull fuck you. I will kill your fucking family and skull fuck them. I will kill your fucking pets and skull fuck them. I will burn your fucking house down and find a way to skull fuck that too. And no jury will convict, they'll wish they had gotten to you first.
Sorry. The first hundred pages of my shit list are devoted solely to Acrobat. Deep breaths, deep breaths
"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.
It's not Apple's fault if Microsoft can't display fonts correctly.
*gets modded down by ignorant Windows users*
And all you have to do is participate in a scam to get it!
Or, ya know, pay.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Two more reasons why Adobe should get Apple to design the next version of Reader for them.
In the link, next to the word "License" there is another word. "Free"
this is awesome. If I had mod points I'd use them to mod you up, even though I would be voiding my own post. "The first hundred pages of my shit list are devoted solely to Acrobat" LOL
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 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.
I wholeheartily second that emotion, Acrobat Reader and Quicktime are the two apps that I've pissed me off so consistently throughout the years. Even Microsoft's shitty Windows evolves and improves(?), why can't they?
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!
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/
I think what started this debate is that the "obvious" link on the foxit site gives you that scam for their "pro" version. If you look a little to the left of the "big button" there is a small download link which gives you the free version without the scam. Or just follow the link up there to download.com. Reminds me of good old AVG Free edition. eventually, I just started googling for AVG free instead of trying to find it's hidden location on grisoft's site.
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 no idea what you do between bouts of terrorizing and skullfucking Adobe personnel, but I've found PDFCreator and Foxit Reader to be excellent default PDF reading/writing apps for my purposes, while Acrobat Pro 5 quietly sits on my drive waiting for me to need to create a form every so often.
Now calm down everyone. Someone put a buffer between this guy and these companies before someone gets hurt!
"Time is nothing; timing is everything."
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
Mac OS Preview isn't a PDF reader... Mac OS X is! Preview is, like, about 20 lines of code, considering that the entire PDF format is built into Core Image... or should I say: Core Image is built completely around PDF.
+5 for Adobe
+1 for Apple
-5 for Microsoft
-10 for Amazon (sorry Kindle, you're fucked)
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I will admit, though, that while Preview is great for small documents, it's not very well setup for long multi-page documents. Reader is better at navigating lengthy documents.
However, I have yet to try Preview out on Leopard, which may have very well become just as good at navigating epic PDFs.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I don't know... I'd say the opposite. I don't mind Adobe too much for short documents, but it gets REALLY slow when you go to longer ones. Preview takes it in stride.
Leopard added the one feature I wanted -- continuous scrolling. In Tiger if you zoomed in so you weren't displaying a full page at once you could only scroll to the bottom of the page, then you had to select the next page. In Leopard you can just keep scrolling on to the next page.
Thankfully, QuickTime (the app) is practically pointless on a Mac, since the whole fucking operating system can work with MOV files just fine. cheapo, 3rd party freeware can work with QT files just fine, as all they do is operating system calls. The only thing QuickTime "PRO" is good for, is that it's still my choice for encoding to H.264 MOVs. Unfortunately, for all you Windows users out there (which includes myself when I'm at work), we're FUCKED, because QuickTime Player is one of the only programs out there that you can play MOVs on. Apple should make a really really great version of QuickTime Player for windows, and just fucking burn QT Player for Mac, it's almost completely pointless now.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
You did notice that the link I gave does not go to Foxit's site, right?
Now if only they would add Postscript file viewing so that Windows would have a PS reader that doesn't completely suck (*cough* GSView *cough*)...
ISO/IEC 15948:2003
"Don't lose your mind trying to set it free..."
Like Apple's Quicktime player is any better? Fortunately, Quicktime Alternative and Real Alternative solves both problems pretty well. Not completely, but good enough to avoid installing both of these obnoxious pieces of software.
I don't want to upgrade to (buy) QuickTime Pro. I don't want Photoshop Starter Edition to take over my other, much better, image editing software or hide my USB drives from me if they happen to contain a graphic file (Windows behavior). I don't want the Google Toolbar. When will these assholes get the hint? Hopefully before they're killed and skull fucked...
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.
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.
That reminds me of the time they found the guy who invented Comic Sans.
The Russians are waiting for PDF to vote for THEM...
If a buffer were the only thing standing between Real and certain doom, Real would never die.
Isn't Quartz basically just a DisplayPDF to OpenGL translator?
Well with a few other tricks attached.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
Heh, we Linux users have it nice, I make H.264/AAC MP4s all the time with mencoder, faac and MP4Box, and play them with no trouble and can stream it over my friend's Feduhra box which runs Darw...
Frack. Can't avoid them lol
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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.
Ahhh... that's pretty much was I was hoping for, and why I think that Preview becomes clumsy for multi-page documents: it treated every page like a completely separate file. Now that they tie them all together, I have no more use for Reader. Good Bye.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
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.
Preview now lets you insert and remove pages as well. That's the only thing I use Acrobat for. So now I don't need ANY Adobe products to deal with PDFs.
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.
FoxIt is wonderful, but is there anything free out there that will put a print-to-pdf driver on Windows machines?
Adobe still need to fix that bloody adobeupdater.exe which gets stuck and 50% or 99% cpu and can't be killed....
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.
Let me adjust those scores for you:
+1 for Apple
0 for Adobe
-3 for Microsoft
-10 for Amazon (sorry Kindle, you're fucked)
Changes I made:
Adobe lost 5 points for threatening to sue Microsoft the last time Microsoft tried implementing PDF in one of their products.
Microsoft gained 2 points for the same thing, but since they're an evil company, I'm not willing to give them more points.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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
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?
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!
Huh. I downloaded the Safari beta for my work WinXP box and find myself using it by preference because its text rendering is so much nicer than Firefox's. I also use it by preference on my Mac G4 at home. I'd use it on Ubuntu if Wine supported VC++ 8.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
You want PDFedit. Ubuntu 7.10 Universe repository.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
PDF is not intended for reflowing, or display in browsers... It's meant to preserve the layout and content in the originally intended form, and it does that well. As for structure, it does support hyperlinks and a proper table of contents providing you use a half decent tool for creating the PDF... Most PDF files created are done using nasty "print to pdf" hacks so it doesnt have the necessary data to create the index. PDF files created with pdflatex and hyperref look nice and have a nice clickable index at the side of your pdf viewer.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
I tried foxit (after reading about it on slashdot) but went back to acrobat reader after a week or so. It's lightweight, but it couldn't open some pdfs and there seemed to be a lot of rough edges. Just my opinion.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Acrobat reader implements their own antialiasing which is much closer to Apple/Safari's than Win32.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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]
I couldn't agree more. Which is why having something like ZoneAlarm on your desktop is a must. Reader tries to contact Adobe. Dialogue pops up asking whether Reader can phone home. I click "Deny and don't ask me again". Reader gets the finger.
I just wish there was something similar on Linux...
Then again two minutes later ZoneAlarmm comes up with it's "Ooh there's an important upgrade" message. So "www.zonealarm.com" is now in my hosts file pointing back to 127.0.0.1.
Ho hum.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
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
So... you're running a proprietary firewall with a license to update for the sole purpose of preventing Adobe Reader from being allowed to connect to the internet? Or am I missing something?
Did you mean to say that it's one of the *few* programs out there, or that it's one of only *a few* programs out there? Both.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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?
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).
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
office 2007?
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
OpenOffice
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?
PrimoPDF, use it on all my personal Windows machines. http://www.primopdf.com/
I have no idea what you do between bouts of terrorizing and skullfucking Adobe personnel, This is the funniest line I've seen ever. My co-workers can't figure out why I'm laughing so hard over here. I wish I had a ton o' mod points.
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.
Because you obviously never need to print anything, especially not forms that aren't consiered valid if not adhering to the standard layout.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
However, I found the capabilities of Preview.app to be steadily declining. Panther's Preview.app had a working fullscreen mode whereas Tiger's didn't. Tiger's Preview.app could edit PDF forms whereas Leopard's will neither show me what I have entered unless it's in the currently active field, nor will it save or print what I have entered.
Preview.app is good, but in some areas it used to be better.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
SELinux? iptables? Using free software that doesn't do stupid things like that in the first place?
http://outcampaign.org/
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.)
There's no "correct" way to display fonts on the screen. You have to decide what to do with the low DPI you have to live with, and, depending on the algorithm, you either get higher contrast but more shape distortion (if you try to snap lines to pixel boundaries), or blurry shapes but less shape distortion (if you blur lines which fall between pixels accordingly between those pixels). The first is what Microsoft does, the second is what Apple does. The first gives more readable text for small fonts on lower DPIs (such as Windows' Tahoma 8 on your typical 19"). The second looks better for larger fonts or on higher DPIs, where there are no elements that are single-pixel thick (and this is why OS X default GUI font is larger than in Windows).
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.
If the metric used for evaluating correctness is that the screen rendering matches the printed rendering, then the Microsoft method is incorrect. If it was found that slightly red-tinged text was more readable than pure black, would it be OK if Windows rendered all black text as reddish-black?
You know if you want "high contrast" text on a Mac, you can just choose a font that was designed for on-screen readability, right?
"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.
Phrase of the year. 100% interchangeable with all current instances of the phrase "desktop publishing" as a noun. Very nice job.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
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.