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Adobe Pushing For Flash and PDF In Open Government Initiative
angryrice tips news that Adobe seems to be campaigning for the inclusion of Flash and PDF in the Obama administration's efforts at increasing government transparency and openness. A post from the Sunlight Labs blog is critical of Adobe's undertaking, in part since PDF is often "non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted." They also say government's priority should be to publish datasets and the APIs to interact with them, rather than choosing how they're displayed in fancy graphs and charts.
PDF remains difficult to manage. Like MS Word documents, an incredible amount of resources is wasted in display information rather than actual text or graphical content. Unlike MS Word, they're parseable: but unfortunately like MS Word, the commercial vendor-sold document creation tool (Adobe Acrobat) generates unstable and unreliable content that interacts very badly with other tools. Oddly, the ghostscript created PDF remains very stable and legible, and tools like "PDFCreator" which uses ghostscript creates long-term viable PDF printouts of other document formats. I use it for complex MS Word documents that cannot be handled by other software, even different versions of MS Word.
Adobe can actually do better with this, and I hope that they will in the future. But it's not stable enough to be reliably indexed or viewable even 5 years in the future, much less 10 or 20 or 100 such as may be needed for legal or historical documents.
Flash, you're quite right. Unless they open up the source, it has no business as yet another document format.
FAIL.
PDF is an ISO standard. See: ISO 32000-1, Document management – Portable document format – Part 1: PDF 1.7
This doesn't change the fact that it is a portable typesetting document format though. It's good for read only documents from your word processor but it shouldn't be (ab)used to store tables or graphs or whatever other crap people use it for.
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As for Flash, lets not even go there. Flash is passable as a streaming video container, if you're making animated cartoons like Homestar Runner or as a platform for small web games but other than those use cases, you're using it wrong.
What are you talking about? The PDF specification has been available as a free download from Adobe with no royalties payable by implementors since PDF was first created. More recently, the PDF/X family of specifications was approved by ISO. These define subsets of the PDF 1.4 specification for different uses (see ISO 15930). There are at least three open source PDF readers that I know of as well as several commercial viewers (Adobe Reader, FoxIt, Apple's Preview, and so on) and numerous tools can generate PDFs.
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There is such; Adobe publishes it and makes it freely available on its web site. It's possible your file didn't follow it, but it's more likely your reader wasn't 100% compliant; it's a very complicated specification.