Re: free/open documentation formats
On Sun, 2 Dec 2001 18:26:13 -0600 (CST), Ian Monroe <eean@mlug.missouri.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Timo Boewing wrote:
>
> > Hello all,
> >
> > for some future and current works i want to provide my writings
> > additionally in other formats than xhtml. Has anyone a link to a list
> > of free documentation formats? The problem is that i want to avoid
> > using formats on that evtl. patents are pending.
> > for example, i would like to provide my stuff using portable document
> > format (pdf) and postscript (ps), but i am not shure if the formats as
> > such are free cos adobe has a trademark on them.
> I do not know about patents, but IIRC GPL software does convert to
> PDF. Good enough for me.
>
> Ian Monroe
> http://mlug.missouri.edu/~eean/
>
There is a patent on LZW compression which can be used by TIFF's, PDF's
and PostScript files (though the use is not obligatory). This might
be a problem for reader software, though most free software that encodes
either of the two will usually prefer deflate compression. The specs for PDF,
PostScript, and TIFF are all published and freely available, so Adobe
can have trademarks out the wazoo on the names, but there's no problem
having free software read/write such files via the published specs
(that's why they were published). There might be other aspects, like
font redistribution (via embedding), that may be a problem from a
licensing standpoint, or other patents that may effect certain portions
of the standards. In general, these standards have enough flexibility
where conforming documents/files can be written without relying on any
patented technology.
Note: For browsers that support it, you can do some pretty tricky things
with Cascading Style Sheets (media: print).
--
Eric G. Miller <egm2@jps.net>
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