Adobe To Release Full PDF Specification to ISO 275
nickull writes "Adobe announced it will release the entire PDF specification (current version 1.7 ) to the International Standards Organization (ISO) via AIIM. PDF has reached a point in its maturity cycle where maintaining it in an open standards manner is the next logical step in evolution. Not only does this reinforce Adobe's commitment to open standards (see also my earlier blog on the release of flash runtime code to the Tamarin open source project at Sourceforge), but it demonstrates that open standards and open source strategies are really becoming a mainstream concept in the software industry.
So what does this really mean? Most people know that PDF is already a standard so why do this now? This event is very subtle yet very significant. PDF will go from being an open standard/specification and de facto standard to a full blown de jure standard. The difference will not affect implementers much given PDF has been a published open standard for years. There are some important distinctions however. First — others will have a clearly documented process for contributing to the future of the PDF specification. That process also clearly documents the path for others to contribute their own Intellectual property for consideration in future versions of the standard. Perhaps Adobe could have set up some open standards process within the company but this would be merely duplicating the open standards process, which we felt was the proper home for PDF. Second, it helps cement the full PDF specification as the umbrella specification for all the other PDF standards under the ISO umbrella such as PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/E. The move also helps realize the dreams of a fully open web as the web evolves (what some are calling Web 2.0), built upon truly open standards, technologies and protocols."
ISO approved PDF (Score:5, Insightful)
Kudos to them (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know that this move has more meaning today than if it was done two years ago, but I certainly see more motivation today. The purpose of the ODF is to ensure that 100 years from now we can still access data. Closed formats mean data may not be accessible in the future. PDF used to be the sole means to have a document look exactly the same across any platform. That is no longer the case, and even Microsoft has opened the standard (mostly) on their new Office data files.
While I still applaud the effort, Adobe is late to the party.
Thanks Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation for mere mortals: Adobe is feeling the breath of Microsoft and its Metro [wikipedia.org]. They are so scared to become the next Netscape they are trying to nil any reason people may have to use Microsoft's XPS.
Not already a standard (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Kudos to them (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I disagree. Even when open office formats, the document won't look exactly the same on one an other platform. Example : the open document format (.odt) renders somewhat differently when opened in OpenOffice for Windows and OpenOffice for Linux. And it may be completely different when opened with koffice.
The content is the same, though.
What I believe is the
Go Open and Win! (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare that to Sun with Java. Sun just wouldn't let go, so it never got beyond being just another product that competitors had to *take down!* One of those was Microsoft, but they themselves made the same mistake with Microsoft Word. Remember how DOC files used to be the "standard" (cough) for distributing documents on the web? Now it's all either PDF or HTML. If MS had let go, maybe, people would have used that?** In the long run, when we're talking about data which *needs* to be interchangable and not tied to one software vendor, an open spec will win. Especially a better one! (PDFs look the same. Word DOCs don't!)
(Reading this and feeling good Adobe? *great*. Now please head on over to Joel and learn about user interface design http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog
Anyway, PDF and PS still rock and I'm glad they won!
** = Yes, Microsoft did make a feint with their Office XML, but everyone recognizes it for the debacle it is. Sorry Dad!
Re:Kudos to them (Score:4, Insightful)
I do too. This is a very mature and wise decision for Adobe to make.
I know now that I was wrong, but I did not care for PDFs for years. And still to this day I have issues with people that don't do them correctly (basically those that put a bunch of huge images into a PDF container).
But with the advent of Linux and especially OS X being able to create PDFs so easily, and I can share documents with anybody and have them look like they are supposed to look is very nice.
Although I would have prefered if this was an open spec with quality PDF generators from day one, 10 years or so of progress to that ultimate goal is not bad in the long run.
This model should be _the_ standard for propriatary data formats. By that, I mean going from propriatary to an open standard if it cannot be an open standard from the beginning. Autodesk, MS, etc, I'm looking at you for adopting such a respectable decision for document formats.
Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not that people don't think of PDF as a standard - it's that it's insanely expensive to have as a "feature".
I mean seriously, think about it - you can buy a "normal" version of Office for the price of being able to export your documents to a PDF. Arguably the utility of Office applications is significantly higher than the ability to ship PDF's around.
It is also very clear from Adobe's pricing that they have you by the balls. Distiller isn't worth that much.
Not only do the creators of PDF's get screwed, the reader software (up until the latest version) has sucked hard. It had a tendency to stay open and use copious amounts of RAM even whenthere were no PDF docs being viewed. Performance wasn't really what they were after either and the ads in Reader were pretty awful too.
There is no reason that it needs to cost so much to create non-editable documents.
Re:Kudos to them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ISO approved PDF (Score:2, Insightful)
ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (OpenDocument Format) was the first nail.
Dont confuse OpenSource with Open Standards (Score:4, Insightful)
There can be no doubt or argument that there should be only one open standard. Open meaning not owned by any entity or for-profit company. Ideally the standard should be specified and updated on behalf of all the consumers or all the people by the government or an institute chartered by it. The Standard specifying body should be completely neutral and agnostic. It should allow all players, big and small, for profit and non-profit, commercial and non commercial a level playing field. Such is the case with your nuts and bolts (SAE and DIN spec) or your engine oil or light bulbs or extension cords or ASCII encoding (not EBCDIE if any remembers that) and ANSI language specs.
Open Source, one can debate, one can agree to various extent the usefulness or the lack of it. Pros and cons you can disagree with me. As long as neither you nor I control the standards, it is a level playing field and the market and history will prove either you or me as correct. Same with free software.
Currently there are three standards being specified. Which itself is bad. OpenDoc, a microsoft thingie called OpenXML and now the OpenPDF. I like OpenXML least because it pretends to be a standard but it cant be implemented by all players without help/license from Microsoft. It has the audaucity to enshrine bugs of Office97 and Word6 and WordPerfect5 as standards . OpenDoc is already well on its way in the standards process. PDF has a much wider user installed base and has a financial muscle of a decent profit making company and its self interest. I wish PDF and OpenDoc will merge and come up with a unified standard.
Re:ISO approved PDF (Score:5, Insightful)
Evince is fast and snappy here on my old and busted PIII 700Mhz, with only 128MB RAM.
Re:Kudos to them (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ISO approved PDF (Score:5, Insightful)
Foxit [foxitsoftware.com]. Windows and (now) Linux. Takes about 1/2 a second to open.
If you have a Mac, you have a slick one built in.
Re:Kudos to them (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft's Office XML format is a half-hearted attempt to conform to standards. Really, it's another example of MS trying to hold onto their monopoly. Adobe is doing it the right way by fully opening the specification. From the initial evaluations of the MS proposal: Office XML specification is done in such a way that only MS can implement it.
Re:ISO approved PDF (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this a nail in the MS XML coffin?
First, hopefully you were referring to XPS (XML Paper Specification) and not OpenXML, which many of the replies seem to assume. I don't see this as a counter move actually, but rather as business as usual. PDF has been an open standard for a long time and I don't know that any real player has any trouble getting Adobe to add to the spec. I'm glad they've formalized the process and renewed their commitment to keeping PDF an open standard.
I also don't see that PDF has much of a chance in the battle against XPS. Unless Microsoft is forbidden from bundling readers and writers with Windows, it will take over most of the market via that monopoly leveraging. By the time the courts act I suspect the market will already be destroyed and everyone will be locked into one set of tools made by MS. The courts will eventually rule against MS, and Adobe will get some money, but the market will never be repaired and consumers will be stuck with a PDF replacement where they can only get tools from one vendor and those tools will never be improved again.
I could be wrong. The courts could be faster than molasses or the industry as a whole could see the trap coming and stick with PDF despite MS. I don't suspect that will be the case though. The most realistic hopeful scenario would be Linux adoption by corporations and government taking off for managed desktops and OS X taking off in the home market sufficiently that the Windows monopoly is weakened enough so that MS cannot effectively manage a takeover based on their monopoly alone.
Re:ISO approved PDF (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the most verbose XML couldn't come close to the unbelievable bloat that is .PDF.
The PDF standard does not seem particularly bloated to me.
I got sick of PDF's taking forever to loading, and the reader hanging constantly on our PC's at work, so I banned them from from the office. It shouldn't take a bleeding edge machine to open plain old documents in a reasonable amount of time.
Ignorance is one of the main reasons why open standards lose to MS proprietary ones in the market. The average person does not understand the advantages. One of the main advantages is that no one is locked into a single vendor for their tools. Despite this almost everyone uses the combination of Window+IE+Adobe Acrobat Reader Plug-in. This is a terrible toolset and is bloated, slow, and poorly designed. Windows can't multi-task memory resources if your life depended upon it. IE itself is bloated and poorly handles threading plug-ins and will hang the whole process until a download is complete. The acrobat plug-in is slow and bloated with all the default settings turned on. The end result is an average user with an average machine clicking on a PDF link and their whole machine grinding to a halt while it waits for the download to finish, then they get to wait yet longer while the Acrobat plug-in eventually gets around to its main purpose.
The solution is, quite simply, don't use that combination of tools. If you're on Windows there are plenty of great, free PDF readers. Foxit is my favorite. On Linux I like XPDF and on OS X I like Preview. You have choices because PDF is an open standard. Blaming a standard for the failings of a given tool is just plain incorrect.
Now I imagine you won't care what I say anyway and will be quite happy when Microsoft's bundled XPS format takes over the market. It will even render faster for you for some time, since the default tools will be built into the OS's display APIs. You'll probably be happy about this for years until you realize you can't move to another platform because all your files are trapped in one only MS's reader will open. Moreover, you'll probably be wondering why you need a top end machine 5 years from now to open files you used to be able to open on your old machine, but since there will only be one reader available you'll be stuck with that. And if they start adding DRM as a mandatory feature on XPS files, so that you have to register all the documents you create with MS, well what can you do? Sure you'll complain about these things, but what will you do? Everyone uses XPS and if you ever want to submit a resume you need to have Windows with its built-in XPS tools.
...or maybe you won't. Maybe you and the rest of the industry will wise up to the advantages of open standards, as a few large organizations currently seem to be doing. Maybe you'll just download a good PDF viewer and think to yourself, wow I'm glad I have options and I'm not stuck with just one viewer, that would suck."
Re:ISO approved PDF (Score:5, Insightful)
Find a solution to the problem. That's your job.
Re:ISO approved PDF (Score:4, Insightful)
Like Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, etc.?
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that I can print to XPS right now, but I can't print to PDF without paying 300 bones (standard edition) or 449 (professional).
There are a coupe of things to note in this. With PDF there are lots of free tools to read and write PDFs, as well as a lot of closed tools. With XPS, there is only Microsoft. You claim you have to pay for PDF generation tools, but that is only because you're only considering offerings from one vendor. Worse yet you assume you have not paid for XPS generation tools, when in fact the cost of them is rolled into Windows Vista and MS Office. Even if you don't want XPS and would rather use PDF, you still have to pay if you buy either of these products.
Not only do the creators of PDF's get screwed, the reader software (up until the latest version) has sucked hard.
Yeah, if you only look at one tool, it might be a bad one. So you think it would be better to move to a market where there is only one company that can create said tools, instead of the situation we have now where there are numerous companies creating tools both free and for sale? I suppose if you never look at any other tools, it doesn't matter to you much, huh?
My desktop system is OS X. It has a built in PDF reader that is simple and fast. It can quickly generate PDFs from pretty much any application. MS could have done the same thing with Windows, but they did not. Instead they went with XPS, their own, proprietary, closed competitor. Do you really think that is going to benefit you in the long run?
Re:Kudos to them (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, one answer is that PDF can not do that. For instance if you print the same document that runs to the very edge of the page on two printers, one with a 1/4" margin and one with a 1/8" margin, you have two options. You can scale it, or not. If you scale it, the documents will be different sizes. If you do not, different amounts of the document will be unprinted (they lie in that unprintable margin area.) PDF doesn't override the physical limitations of the output device, it works within them just like every other program.
Another answer is that word is a big pile of crap.
Re:Thanks but no thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
What you mean is that it's not human-readable. And it's not designed to be -- what's the point of that? It's not going to be human-writable or human-editable.
And it's plain, readable XML instead of a 25-year-old printer description language.
XML is a subset of a 40-year-old markup language. XML has become the ultimate cancer on computing -- it's this seductive hammer that makes everything look like a nail, and when the first round of XML doesn't quite solve the problem, the solution is to throw on a little *more* XML.
XML is wastefully large, so all XML formats have to be compressed to be at all competetive in terms of file size.
XML is totally un-indexable, so you can't let any single XML document grow too big (because you always have to parse from the start to get the data you really want). So XML formats often have to break up their data into multiple XML files, and then make the "file format" a zip archive of various XML documents sprinkled around.
Your applicaiton can build files using any XML parsing engine, instead of having to license a PDF library.
Do you have any idea how miniscule a part of PDF *or* XPS functionality consists of parsing? One chapter (~130 pages) of the PDF spec covers syntax. The remaining 7 chapters (~650 pages) deal with how to interpret and render what you've parsed.
That XML library you use to read/write XPS files is going to be pretty useless on its own, unless you're also using a library that specifically knows the XPS format.
Re:You pretentious jackass (Score:3, Insightful)