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Norway Mandates Government Use of ODF and PDF
siDDis writes "Earlier this year Slashdot mentioned that Norway was moving towards mandatory use of ODF and PDF. Now it's official: the Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009. There are three formats that have been mandated for all documentation between authorities, users and partners. HTML for all public information on the Web, PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved and ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit. Documents may also be published in other formats, but they must always be available in either ODF or PDF."
My vote would be 'no' on postscript. The tools aren't as commonly installed (or as refined) as PDF. Worse, I believe .ps files commonly do not include the fonts they rely on, leading to lots of headaches. For that and whatever other reasons, .ps is a cavalcade of "execution stack" error messages, while pdf always works.
Joke or no, but "Translated by hand"?
By someone who doesn't know Norwegian, or?
That's a machine translation. The words are unusual (to say the least) and the grammar is wrong.. e.g. "åpen standarder" should read "åpne standarder". "har bestemte det" should read "har bestemt at", etc.
Does it compress better or something?
Yes. For pages of pure bitonal content, the JBIG2 image compression scheme can produce files approximately 30-40x smaller than the equivalent using CCITT G4. This is such a massive improvement that it makes it tempting to simply represent all documents in raster form with ancillary text information -- in other words, it competes with vector graphics as far as side. No other widely supported potential archival format provides JBIG2. This in itself is an enormous benefit, but not quite a deal-maker for PDF.
PDF really shines in that it is easy to parse and has a limited, well-defined graphics language. The PDF/A standard even further restricts the classes of operations a conformant file can perform. On top of other things, it spells out the requirements for fonts, to ensure that documents rendered in the future will appear as intended. It also dictates that details of the document's semantic structure be embedded to assist analysis of the archived data in the future.
I probably sound like a shill for PDF, but that isn't the case. I simply write commercial code which deals with PDF. It is a terrible shame that Adobe's viewer products have made such a bad impression on everyone. I believe PDF is a well-designed, simple, extensible format with a hell of a lot going for it, if you simply discount everything with the word "Adobe" in it.
That would be like the Australian Tax Office requiring IE for some business reporting. The standard response is that you can do it or be fined. At least they've fixed the need for specific versions of the JVM.
This was a few years back, but maybe they've changed. Then again, it's the tax office.
All of that said, proper PDF is PostScript. You can feed it to the PostScript interpreter and it will render. It's not full PostScript, but a subset that is easier to process and isn't a full interpretive language as PostScript is. I've wrtten programs in PostScript that have nothing to do with printing, it's a bit similar to Forth.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Gah, way to want to reset the clock by 10-12 years. PDF was developed because shuffling PostScript files around was tedious and error prone. The files are large, they don't contain fonts, and since they are plaintext the cr/cr-lf/lf line end issue can affect the file on different OS's, etc... The publishing industry labored under PostScript for far too long. The first P in PDF stands for Portable for a reason. It's a far more portable format than *.ps.