Before PDF: John Warnock's 'Camelot'

Karl De Abrew writes: "In the Spring of 1991 Dr. John Warnock wrote a paper he dubbed "Camelot" in which the Adobe Systems Co-founder and CEO laid out the foundation for what has become Acrobat/PDF. With the author's permission, Planet PDF is pleased to publish the full-text of that historic document. [Archived copy here.]" Of course, now it's 2002, and the dream of universal display / printing remains only partly realized; PDFs really have helped to narrow the gap between dream and reality, though.

OSX, PDF, and Windows

[banky]

Everyone knows about OSX and DPDF. When will Windows abandon the bitmapped display it has used since, well, forever? Is MS working on a system similar to DPDF? Or do they not even really regard the technology as worthwhile? It seems odd to me, since MS's cash cow is Word and Excel, that they are essentially using the same graphics engine they have always used, albeit much faster and with more features. (opponents of MS will say that this applies to all their technologies). Is it merely that they (MS) have not built their own, and are hesitant to license PDF from Adobe? Or are there strong technical reasons (besides, I guess, breaking the old software).

They Certainly Changed the Sales Plans

[herbierobinson]

Note that the paper indicates they were originally planning on selling the viewers. I'll bet there is an internal political story there...

I assume they eventually got paid for including it in the printer drivers in Mac OS and Windows, but initially, they were just giving it away. In fact, they also gave away the rendering tools to just about everybody who owned another Adobe product. Of course the net result was that it quickly became indispensable.

This Post Intentionally Left Blank

[pheph]

... or how printing is highly overrated and I'd rather use hyperlinks than (see page 41). I don't quite see how PDF is better than a regular markup language, a manual or technical paper isn't a work of art. Why does it need to look exactly the same. I'm looking for information, not a breathtaking setup of paragraphs. Why not do it in html?

And will someone please tell me what's up with those "This page intentionally left blank". Not only is it contradictive, but a waste of paper/time/etc.

Prepress industry

[lamj]

I know most readers here (myself included) are from IT industry, let me also introduce some effects of PDF on prepress industry. (Let's look at things from another perspective)

In the old days, there was a lot of press approval and proofs being sent via the ad. agency to the end user for approval. With PDF, even the end user can fire up PDF reader on their own computer and view the electronic proofs, it is not color accurate (looking at the screen), but for most part (especially small cheap run), it works well.

The same PDF sometimes also get on the RIP (Rasterized Image Processor) for output, this assures same results from the electonic proofs. (accuracy is very important in this industry)

Major problem now is sometimes a prepress shop get one job done and sent to other for output to film or CTP (to plate), the PDF files does not have fonts embeded (PDF have this "feature"), then, it will become a hunt for the right fonts.

Prepress shops have mixed feelings for PDF, most that I talked to see it as a constructive technology.

MS & PDF

[lamj]

I think one of the major resistance that PDF have today is support from major Word Processor. MS Office and most major suite does not support saving as PDF "yet".

By the way, the most easiest way to covert MS Word doc to PDF without Acrobat would be Adobe's website, they offer 5 free online file conversion (supporting many source formats). Might be useful for some of you.

I don't know about you...

[Viceice]

... but i feel for publishing purposes, i have yet to see anything with the ease of use of Acrobat. Espcially in publishing, where you have to mail upteen versions of magazine pages etc to clients who arn't technically oriented but whose go ahead for a run is needed.

Besides, even with pros, acrobat gives WYSIWYG, embeded fonts, compression for text and images and so on.... i think the size overhead for all this is worth every bit it takes up...

And even if you don't agree, which is more moronic, sending in MS Publisher .PUB or Pagemaker and PDF?

Re:Profound.

[scrutty]

Huge NEXSTEP fan that I am I still feel compelled to point out that Display Postscript was Adobe's tech,and licensed by NeXT, and also that Sun NeWS [postscript.org] was doing this before Display Postscript.

Re:I couldn't live without it today

[khuber]

>PDF is an open standard. It is NOT controlled by a single company interest

I don't think you know what you're talking about! I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I think there a few things to consider. My understanding is that it's "Adobe PDF" and it's a de facto published "standard" controlled by Adobe. PDF is a derivative of PostScript Level 2. It is most definitely proprietary even though the format specification is available. Usually when people say "open standard", they mean that it is a "de jure" standard controlled by a recognized standards body like ISO, and Adobe Systems is a single interest, not a standards body. Another usage of "open standard" with respect to Adobe PDF refers to the fact that it's published and royalty-free. If Microsoft publishes the Word document format, it is still a proprietary format.

The problem with proprietary formats like PDF is that a company who wants to influence the standard cannot join the controlling standards body. So basically if you don't like the direction Adobe Systems is taking with their format, you're screwed unless you have clout with the company. If you're concerned with archiving information for a long period of time or choosing an interoperable format, the proprietary nature of PDF is discouraging.

Don't get me wrong, I like using the PDF format and have produced some nice documents using pdflatex, ebnf2ps, and other free PostScript tools. I just think it's important to understand the limitations of PDF which are primarily that it is 1) a publishing format more than an editing format and 2) Adobe controls it. At work, for example, documents are stored and passed through an editing and publishing workflow as XML, archived as XML, and only rendered to PDF on demand at the end.

I hate to ramble on, but there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on this topic. Some other people have made the analogy between the JPEG graphics format and a format with layer information like Photoshop's proprietary format. PDF is not designed to carry the types of metadata you might want in a document workflow as well as XML (or SGML), just like JPEG only represents the final rendered and flattened ("published") image from what may have been a multilayer graphic in the editing process. In other words, PDF is not a universal document format when you are concerned with editting or automation which relies on metadata that is not part of the document displayed to a user.

-Kevin

LaTex?

[markmoss]

The computer industry already had a standard format for controlling the layout, fonts, and appearance of printed text. Tex. I'm not real familiar with it, but I know it existed in the 70's, is still around as LaTex, and I think it's not proprietary. So can anyone clarify whether PDF has advantages over LaTex for anyone besides Adobe?

Use DjVu

[Anonymous Coward]

DjVu [sourceforge.net] is a document/image format that has many advantages over PDF:

• the files are smaller and display a whole lot faster.
• unlike PDF, it has no portability problems due to fonts, plug-ins, out-of-sync versions, encryption, etc..... Documents look exactly identical down to the pixel on every platform.
• it's perfect for scanned documents and photos (PDF does a terrible job at that)
• it is GPL'd [sourceforge.net], although the best compressors are commercial (like with MPEG).
• there are free conversion servers here [djvuzone.org], and here [djvuzone.org].
• the wiewer is 1.5MB (Acroread is 16MB).

Yeah, I'm biased, but still....

- AC