Adobe has expressed interest in making the movement of digital document files more open, and having their format (PDF), being the popular standard. PDF's will soon become the international standard for electronic documents after Adobe handed over the copyright to ISO."By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness", says Kevin Lynch, CTO at Adobe.
Most businesses use PDFs as the main way of transitioning from paper to electronic documentation, and now a slew of new readers, writers and development tools for the format will likely be unveiled in the near future thanks to the move.
The new PDF standard is called ISO 32000-1.
View: TechRadar View: ISO Press Release
Have you tried Adobe Reader 9?
Have you tried Adobe Reader 9?
Reader 9 is great i have tried it personally it is huge improvement over the bloated pig Reader 8
it run instantly
i have uninstalled the ol' foxit reader
As for the idea of a very lightweight reader, I'm all for it. THe issue becomes can a lightweight reader degrade gracefully if it does not have a specific ability that the full blown reader has an the specific document requires. If I was writing some such Reader I would have the LWR open the full blown version of Adobe Reader. That way the end-user doesn't have to do anything.
You can remove Adobe Speed Launcher and it will still start up as fast. Also, it doesn't seem to hang your browser when it opens a PDF.
Actually there's already xPDF, Evince, Foxit, and more. There's a lot of support for PDF even when Adobe held the copyrights. But now it will get even better
Nothing much else.
To be a ISO standard is not equal to be opensource, this can help to developer a alternative but still adobe can break the standard, left out of the standard key features or simply giving a inconsistent and hard to follow standard.
As for the idea of a very lightweight reader, I'm all for it. THe issue becomes can a lightweight reader degrade gracefully if it does not have a specific ability that the full blown reader has an the specific document requires. If I was writing some such Reader I would have the LWR open the full blown version of Adobe Reader. That way the end-user doesn't have to do anything.
In one sense, there always was a light-weight reader: just disabling all the never-needed plugins gave it a massive speed boost, I remember there were (are?) freeware programs that could do this for you and made using Reader a perfectly bearable experience.
Perhaps the best thing they could do is just have Reader scan the document and only load the plugins it needs?
You need to "right-click > Run as Administrator" for that to work.
You need to "right-click > Run as Administrator" for that to work.
Thats one of the reasons I can't stand Windows, file type association should be allowed on a per-user basis. Why can't Windows do that?
It can do that (and I think has been able to since at least XP). I just checked: using the built-in windows "Set Associations" control panel does not require a UAC prompt on Vista.
Absolutely
(that would be the end of my comment, but i will expand to avoid wars)
The reason being: it takes too long to load and "render" images/text, on my 1.6ghz Dual 1GB ram, it takes it like 10-20 seconmds to render a image, while adobe 9 does it instantly or few secs.
Last edited by QuarterSwede on 04 Jul 2008 - 23:59
I second that. I want my formatting to all remain the same so that when the employer receives it, they see it in the same way I do. All the employer has to have is one slight difference in settings and all my layout gets screwed up because of it.
Then again, if employers are using 'automated tools' for their selection process, they deserve to get the 'bottom of the barrel' candidates.
QFT
If anyone has watched, I'm sure they're lining up flash paper as a replacement for PDF.
They've opened up the specifications to Flash, but even so, there is a mountain of work that needs to be done in implementation. IMHO they should just opensource the Flash plugin - there is no value in it. The value is derived from the tools that make the content, all the plugin is, is a way for the end user to access that content. Its like a television in otherwords. The value is what comes to the television, not the television itself.
A lot of the time, you don't want your layout messed around with, though. PDF is great for that.
OpenOffice 3 is supposed to have the ability to edit PDFs (and not just export to them). Looking forward to that! There is a free Linux program called PDFEdit but it is a bit tricky to use.
OpenOffice 3 is supposed to have the ability to edit PDFs (and not just export to them). Looking forward to that! There is a free Linux program called PDFEdit but it is a bit tricky to use.
IIRC, the latest version of Evince (which uses the popper back end) is apparently meant to have editing abilities too.
Editing PDF from a programmers point of view is pretty difficult considering that it is doing something it was never designed to do - the idea of electronic forms an after thought in many cases.
Why? OOXML is an ISO standard for some time already.
And Adobe threatened to sue MS if they allw export to PDF.
Why? OOXML is an ISO standard for some time already.
And Adobe threatened to sue MS if they allw export to PDF.
Apparently there are attempts to over turn it. Mind you, comparing OOXML to PDF, is comparing Apples with Orange. The more correct comparison would be PDF vs. XPS. IMHO Microsoft should submit XPS to a standards body.
As for OOXML, IIRC it is already an ECMA standard. I think the issue so many have with OOXML is the complexity (which is justifiable), if I was Microsoft I would provide a opensource implementation under *BSD licence (clean room implementation) and allow others to use that in their products. It would stop the whining from the OSS world, and Microsoft could point and say, "hey, it can be done".
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