[Coco] Re: why you should stick with pdf

[John E. Malmberg]

First, never put the Maltemedia list in the reply when you also have the 
  the ColorComputer(at)yahoo in the reply.  All that does is post 
duplicate copies to the Maltemedia list.

Second, It really does not make any difference to me what format is 
chosen to put the archive in, as long as I can build a reader for it.

I have several magazine collections on CD-ROM now, and most of them have 
their own proprietary viewer that only runs on a limited number of 
platforms.  I think only one can be read on anything that supports HTML 
and ISO-9660.

But lets make it clear about the PDF standard:

1. It is not an open standard, it is a closed proprietary standard that 
is somewhat documented for public use.  No one other than Adobe knows 
how complete the public documentation is or has ever been.

So it should not be called an Open Standard until Adobe releases it as 
such, no matter how popular it is.

2. It is constantly changing and the open source viewers are typically 
not available for the current version.

So a 2 year old version of PDF may be portable, but the latest version 
is probably not.  And the authoring tools may not be able to restrict 
themselves to down-level compatibility on their content output.

3. It is a very complex standard and includes the ability to have 
operating system specific content in it.  It is quite possible that the 
open source viewers for even the older versions can really display all 
content.

And as it has a large number of internal formats that it can store 
graphics in, it is quite possible that there are formats that the OCR 
programs can not handle, unless they actually invoke a plug-in from Adobe.

I know of a third party who wrote a viewer based on the public 
information and a license from Adobe.  While it worked, the cost time of 
keeping it up to date with the current PDF standard was too high to 
support the revenue from the few people who would pay to have a 
supported PDF viewer on a platform that Adobe was no longer interested 
in.  This was done because at the time XPDF was not good enough to 
display all PDF content, and I do not know if XPDF has been updated to 
fix the specific problem that triggered the project.

I looked at the specifications from Adobe, they are very complex.

4. Adobe has removed viewers for some platforms from it's site.  It's 
"portable" java viewer (version 2) is not available, and neither is 
version 1 of it.

Version 1 ran on all platforms, version 2 only ran on Apple Macintosh, 
unless you copied an Apple copyrighted Java class to your system.  That 
class is only available in a Macintosh compressed archive from Apple, 
and I have found no "free" decompressors for other platforms that can 
extract it.

If you still have version 1 of the JAVA viewer, it still works for the 
version of PDF that was in use at the time it was released.  You just 
can not get new copies.

So while a viewer may be available for your platform now from Adobe, it 
may not run on a newer version of your platform, and the older one may 
be withdrawn for download at any time.

5. Adobe could stop updating it's public specification at any time, but 
continue to modify it's viewers and writers.

Bottom line, it is not open, and while unlikely, Adobe could abandon it 
at any time in favor of a new closed document format that requires 
royalty fees for a licenced viewers.

9 track Reel to real tapes ruled as a computer standard for a longer 
time than PDF has been around.  Try getting one read now.
I have paper tapes from high school that I do not know if I will ever be 
able to read them into a computer again.

No matter how popular something is in the computer world, when the next 
new thing comes along, it can disappear real fast.

But there really is not many choices out there for encapsulating 
graphics in a document in a portable fashion.

-John
wb8tyw(at)qsl.net
Personal Opinion Only