Now I won't have to start endless discussions with people not liking PDF because it is 'proprietary', an argument that IMHO made no sense because Adobe has always allowed developers to use the PDF Reference as described in section 1.4 of the PDF Reference.
The only downside: I have just published a book about PDF saying PDF is a de facto standard as opposed to the ISO standards PDF/X and PDF/A (read the third chapter that is available for free). If I had known this was coming, I could have asked to wait for a month and a half before printing it;-)
Granted, I'm not talking about Command and Control systems, but the DoD has been using OS Software for years now. I know because they are using iText to produce billions of PDF documents. I have been mailing with DoD developers regularly in the past (and neither I, nor my product is American). It's not as if they have changed their mind about OSS overnight. The remarkable thing is that they are now coming out with a policy about OSS, and that they are considering to use it on a larger scale. (Yes, we're talking about Operating Systems now!)
It's clearly FUD. There is absolutely no ground for such a lawsuite. Everybody can write a PDF engine and distribute it for free. The proof? Adobe is shipping a product (MacroMedia's Cold Fusion Server) with my F/OSS library iText to produce PDF from Cold Fusion pages. I never heard anybody at Adobe complain because I wrote a free PDF engine. As a PDF specialist I know that the big money isn't in the conversion from Word to PDF. PDF is a lot more than text documents. The Acrobat product family is used for completely different reasons than a product like MS Word or a free library like iText.
Hello all, my name is Bruno Lowagie and it was a pleasant surprise to see that the PDF that is created when you click on the print icon in Google Calendar is generated by iText: see http://www.lowagie.com/iText/ That's my own little Java-PDF library! This is GREAT!!!
Everybody knows Adobe as the inventor of PDF, but unfortunately the company was nowhere on the servermarket. MacroMedia on the other hand has a more than interesting server product: Cold Fusion. The combination of both technologies looks very promising to me.
But wait a minute! Weren't you able to produce PDF documents with Cold Fusion? Of course you were: ColdFusion MX 7.0 is shipped with the iText.jar (iText, a free Java-PDF library, hosted on SourceForge, originally developped by yours truly).
And now comes the funny part: due to some regulations I don't fully understand, MM can't use any Adobe technology (or vice versa) till the end of the year. This means that the new company Adobe Systems will be shipping iText in their products for PDF generation.
The company that invented PDF, shipping my F/OS library hosted at SourceForge! What a weird way things work out some times.
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The (threat of a) law-suit against Microsoft had nothing to do with IP, everything with anti-trust. This discussion has been held before.
This is great news!
;-)
Now I won't have to start endless discussions with people not liking PDF because it is 'proprietary', an argument that IMHO made no sense because Adobe has always allowed developers to use the PDF Reference as described in section 1.4 of the PDF Reference.
The only downside: I have just published a book about PDF saying PDF is a de facto standard as opposed to the ISO standards PDF/X and PDF/A (read the third chapter that is available for free). If I had known this was coming, I could have asked to wait for a month and a half before printing it
Granted, I'm not talking about Command and Control systems, but the DoD has been using OS Software for years now. I know because they are using iText to produce billions of PDF documents. I have been mailing with DoD developers regularly in the past (and neither I, nor my product is American). It's not as if they have changed their mind about OSS overnight. The remarkable thing is that they are now coming out with a policy about OSS, and that they are considering to use it on a larger scale. (Yes, we're talking about Operating Systems now!)
It's clearly FUD. There is absolutely no ground for such a lawsuite. Everybody can write a PDF engine and distribute it for free.
The proof? Adobe is shipping a product (MacroMedia's Cold Fusion Server) with my F/OSS library iText to produce PDF from Cold Fusion pages. I never heard anybody at Adobe complain because I wrote a free PDF engine.
As a PDF specialist I know that the big money isn't in the conversion from Word to PDF. PDF is a lot more than text documents. The Acrobat product family is used for completely different reasons than a product like MS Word or a free library like iText.
Hello all,
my name is Bruno Lowagie and it was a pleasant surprise to see that the PDF that is created when you click on the print icon in Google Calendar is generated by iText: see http://www.lowagie.com/iText/
That's my own little Java-PDF library! This is GREAT!!!
You missed iText.e nt/index.html), or translate operations on a java.awt.Graphics2D object to PDF operators and operands automatically (http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/directconte nt/graphics2D/).
You can write PDF syntax by using some Java methods (http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/directcont
Everybody knows Adobe as the inventor of PDF, but unfortunately the company was nowhere on the servermarket. MacroMedia on the other hand has a more than interesting server product: Cold Fusion. The combination of both technologies looks very promising to me.
But wait a minute! Weren't you able to produce PDF documents with Cold Fusion? Of course you were: ColdFusion MX 7.0 is shipped with the iText.jar (iText, a free Java-PDF library, hosted on SourceForge, originally developped by yours truly).
And now comes the funny part: due to some regulations I don't fully understand, MM can't use any Adobe technology (or vice versa) till the end of the year. This means that the new company Adobe Systems will be shipping iText in their products for PDF generation.
The company that invented PDF, shipping my F/OS library hosted at SourceForge! What a weird way things work out some times.
I just found out: if you install CFusionMX7, you get a free Java PDF jar in your lib-directory: iText.jar
I would be very honored if Adobe would sell ColdFusion software and ship it with the F/OS lib I created...