scr4: Proprietary formats are bad because the company that owns the format can make bad things happen. Not allow reasonable extensions, make changes to “break” things in other companies compatible software, etc. Adobe has a poor track record in this regard. Look at the mess they have made with font rights. (I go back to the “Empress” days myself.)
As to DougC’s objection. He actually is making the point against them. Imagine if cars were proprietary. The steering method of a Ford was different from a Chevy, etc. Note that you can get almost all replacement parts from someone else (for less!), and on and on. What if you had to buy Ford brand gas and oil, park in a Ford brand lot, drive on a Ford brand road, etc.? Being locked in is Not Good. The more universal things are, the better. Companies think such things are bad for them, but really it is just the opposite.
ChordedZither: (scripting) Hmm, the stuff in PDF that I looked at looked pretty general. I’ll have to look into again. Perhaps my mistake here.
NeedAHobby. I’ve seen a lot of OCRed scanned PDF docs. That’s better than nothing. But the bozos who don’t even do that get my goat.
(And … Since I use “wget” to suck whole web pages, I never worry about getting only part of a web doc.)
PostScript is still perfectly usable, last time I checked, and it fills the same niche PDFs do in the open-source world (generally speaking, but some people do distribute PDFs and there are open-source PDF rendering engines).
Plus, PostScript is an open standard. It’s a programming language for which there are open-source interpreters (such as ghostscript) and code generators (the TeX family of document creation packages), so nobody can do to it what Adobe has apparently done with PDF. That’s a Good Thing.
So, why is this thread focusing around HTML/XML, Word Document, PDF? Is there a good reason to adopt PDF over PostScript, besides lock-in?
PDF definitely has a place for complex documents which need to be reproduced exactly alike but some people use PDF where a simple graphic file would do. This page http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/Nav_Star_Chart.html has PDF document which is 2 MB and it is a simple graphic which can be easily reduced to a GIF or TIF 1/20th the size
File size. My Master’s thesis, for example, is 12 MB as a PostScript file, 5 MB if gzipped. It’s only 3 MB when converted to PDF. Also Acrobat Reader is easier to install and more user-friendly than GhostScript/GSView.
Because in the real world, we have to deal with the lowest common denominator of users. My customers and clients don’t use ghostscript and wget. It’s all we can do to get them to click a PDF and we may have to hold their hand through the “click here to install Acrobat” process. They expect a document to have certain functionality and if it doesn’t, they’ll throw up their hands and ask for a hardcopy. I’d be happy to use formats like PS or HTML if those formats gave these people what they needed with no install or training issues. They don’t.
And before anyone gets their jollies calling these people idiots and saying we shouldn’t bother with them, note that they are very smart people who are very good at their jobs. They are doctors and lawyers and oil riggers and multi-million dollar distributors. They just don’t have much use for computers and when they do, they need it to work easily. PDF may have a lot of problems, but it provides the easiest avenue for getting documents to these people with the features they require.
No, it doesn’t do the same thing at all. In particular, Postscript relies on the rendering machine to contain all the fonts used in the document being rendered. In practice, people often had trouble reading PS documents for this reason. As a document exchange and archiving format (arguably not purposes it was designed for), Postscript was a bit of a failure precisely because Postscript documents were not self-contained. PDF works for these purposes precisely PDF documents embed the required fonts, making them self-contained. (The same argument,by the way, can be made that HTML is not a good archival format because the rendering of HTML documents depends on many factors external to the document itself.)
Yes, and no. Adobe invented Postscript and publishes the standard (making it “open”) but it’s stiill proprietary. They also publish the standard for PDF, so I don’t see any real difference.
You mean, like this announcement for Postscript version 3? (Notice the copyright notice that makes it clear that “Postscript technology” is created or licensed by Adobe.
The problem you are ignoring is that most “ordinary” people (who use PC’s, by the way) have no idea what Postscript is, or know any free program to use for viewing any document written in it. You would have to explain all that… Most of those same people probably already have a [free] PDF viewer installed in their web browser. If they don’t, it will tell them how to do that, and you won’t have to. That’s what “effectively distributable” means.
In my somewhat limited experience, the only “non-tech” people who know what Postscript is or how to open it at all are people who do typesetting, or people who use Macs–and both those groups are only a very small percentage of the total. I myself don’t even know any free Windows Postscript viewers right off–I have never ever needed one.
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Here in the Real World, though, we have to deal with the fact that the vast majority of people would be stymied by this.
We ship our products in both English and Japanese, and we use PDF for historical reasons. Ironically, our Toolkit’s help system is HTML based, so we actually have to include a fully hyper-linked version of the same document that we have a PDF version of.
At least Acrobat Reader doesn’t crash when you try and view a Japanese document without the proper extensions any more.
Oh, I quite agree. As you can see from my earlier comments, I consider PDF to be an improvement over PS for archival and distribution purposes. And Acrobat Reader is far simpler for most people to install and use than GSVIEW. (and the Acrobat plug-in works reasonably well with most browsers).
But I was addressing the question of whether a free PS viewer existed. I will also add that GSVIEW and Ghostscript allow some manipulation of PS and PDF (e.g. converting from PS to PDF, extracting pages from a PDF document) than can otherwise only be accomplished through the full Adobe Acrobat package (not the free Reader).
Achernar, I’m not aware of any Postscript browser plug-ins. If you have a Postscript viewer, though, you can configure most browsers to launch that as a separate application when clicking on a .ps link. It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s often good enough.