Re: [OT] Open Portable Document Format?
Simonyi Andras wrote:
>Hi,
>
>(sorry for asking this here, but I'm curious about the opinions/infos)
>
>In the good old times I advocated using pdf against other proprietary
>document-formats, because it is more-or less really portable (similar
>look everywhere), the viewer is accessible on most platform, and there
>are available tools for creating/converting (to) pdfs (pdflatex ps2pdf
>etc.). No it seems that with Adobe, pdf became a Bad Thing (TM) as well,
>and for instance in the document-equivalent of GPL (I cannot recall the
>exact name) pdf is mentioned as an example of non-transparent
>document-format as opposed to LaTex-source etc.
>
>My question: is there, or should not be then there a project to create
>an _open_ format similar to pdf? I mean a real page-description
>language, with the tools for converting from other formats etc.
>
>Best regards: Andras
I'm not sure on this, but pdf is just compressed Postscript (.ps) which
is a page-description language in itself. I think that the Postscript
language's specifications are openly available (else we won't have
ghostscript et.al.)
If the ease of conversion is necessary, some people have opted to produce
their documents to XML. There, it only takes some schema or DTD plus some
programming to convert from one format to another. However, as you know,
XML is just a markup language, and you can see the insides of an XML
document easily through a text editor.
Paolo Falcone
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www.edsamail.com
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