[pdftex] Adobe Battles Backward-Compatibility Woes

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Pawe$,1 b(B" == Pawe$,1 b(B Jackowski <P.Jackowski at gust.org.pl> writes:

  >>> "One side of the debate says that since public institutions
  >>> such as governments are legislating the use of PDF as their
  >>> exclusive  format for electronic documents, shouldn't these
  >>> technologies be  public property? ..."
  >> 
  >> Oh yes, let's introduce communism in the United States.  And
  >> let's make Microsoft people's property.

  > Sorry, Reinhard, quite far analogy... What you see in common
  > between communism and public knowledge or technology? Communism is
  > public unawareness and obscurantism :)

As I understand the paragraph I cited, the author suggests to make the
PDF standard public property.

If you want to have a public standard, define one yourself and
convince Adobe to follow it.

Adobe payed people for developing the PDF standard, hence I think
Adobe is the owner.  Adobe has to provide new features in order to
provide new products.  New products are needed to make sure that they
can pay their employees in the future.

I prefer open standards, but i cannot agree with making Adobe's PDF
specification people's property.

Making private property people's property is communism.

  >> I don't think an "army of software engineers" will make a good
  >> product.  An army is a group of soldiers who are supposed to act
  >> on orders without using their brains.  Acroread obviously had
  >> been programmed by a group of soldiers.

  > Agree! Do you see any better solution on the horizont? I
  > don't.

Though Derek does not want to support everything mentioned in the PDF
specs, I think that he has done a really great job already.

I don't expect very much to happen soon.  But I'm not *that*
pessimistic.  A lot of free software already exists and maybe someone
will fit things together.  There is xpdf and there is a free
JavaScript interpreter in Firefox, for example.  It's just a matter of
time until someone merges them.

  >> In my opinion all the Adobe standards are very well documented.
  >> (Though I'm wondering why Adobe is still unable to insert
  >> hyperlinks into their PDF files).

  > ? Sorry, I don't get it; Adobe is unable? or Acroread is unable?
  > or PDF documents from Adobe does not have links?

Threre are many Adobe docs where hyperlinks are missing.  It would be
so nice if I'd simply can click on an index item...

Or am I not up-to-date?

  >> Let me explain why I think that Acroread developers did not use
  >> their brains[...]

  > Meybe there is a lot of useless operations. Probably you are right
  > -- things might be optimized somehow. Whenever I compare renderers
  > i get into conclusion that what you optimize in point A will
  > charge you at B.

Yes, but it is sometimes sufficient to omit some "features".
Writing some stuff to a file and then reading this file immediately
doesn't make much sense.  Especially if it takes so much time.  Hence,

	s/optimize/omit/

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------