PDF Alternatives? 59
An Anonymous Coward writes: "For those of us trying to get rid of Adobe products on our sites, what is the best alternative to PDF? It needs to be something a typical user can easily get a plugin for." There are a couple of obvious choices when it comes to viewing PDF files, like Xpdf -- and several others pointed out on the Boycott Adobe site -- but does anyone have suggestions on the best way to create nicely portable documents? And if someone wants to stick with PDF (but not Adobe), what PDF-creating applications, especially Open Source ones, have people had either successes (to emulate) or failures (to avoid)?
Re:ps2pdf / GNU GhostScript (Score:1)
GIF -- PNG, PDF -- ? (Score:1)
Boycotting Acrobat reader (and using, say, xpdf) isn't the solution. Adobe doesn't make any money from the reader. They make *tons* of money from the acrobat writer. It is that we should try to replace.
Re:ps2pdf / GNU GhostScript (Score:1)
Postscript is a page description language. It requires fonts and graphics and other crap in addition to the postscript file. So PDF is all those things in one file. Rather than just being a vector description it has search and sections and semantic information about the document.
Adobe have turned evil in the last 3 years.
Re:DjVu? (Score:1)
t.
ps2pdf / GNU GhostScript (Score:2)
You could also just distribute the Postscript files and ask Windows users to install Ghostscript (a Windows version is available, I don't know if it works as a plugin), but a lot of users will have trouble with this. And Postscript files are pretty large (they compress well using bzip2, but most Windows users won't know how to decompress a bz2 file). A math prof at my university used Postscript files for his notes, and several people complained they couldn't read the files. They said they'd prefer PDF, so I suggested he use ps2pdf on them. Nobody complained after that.
Re:GIF -- PNG, PDF -- ? (Score:5)
The problem with PDF (and I understand this is a problem just with the ebook format, defined in the latest PDF specification) is not a technology problem (you can implement it freely technologically speaking, you can't do that with GIFs), no patents. The problem is this buggy DMCA. If you are implementing the specification, you may choose to do whatever you want with it, but the DMCA will go after you if make a program that will "break" the security (the DMCA should give provision to interoperability, but they will most likely see you as a criminal, not a hacker (good sense)).
To stop using PDF would really be a step back. PDF is not only a compressed ps, it is a format that tries to overcome problems in the PS language (if you consider that PS and PDF are computer languages it is much harder to make a buggy PDF program then PS, hence, almost all PDF files will open, while PS files from some programs sometimes will *never* print. In PDF, everything in the file is stored as objects in a very "well behaved" way. In PS, you need to use the DSC (document structure conventions), which are special comments on the code with special meaning (comments should not have meaning. It is a hack.) Many programs don't behave well with this DSC comments.
And why use PS? Remember that PS is also a product from Adobe, with the same terms as PDF.
Or so they say...
Re:Alternative formats. (Score:2)
If you want something that has nothing to do with Adobe even indirectly you might have a problem. They have been the ones doing much of the R&D in this field for the last 15+ years. So their hands are in a lot of things it least in small ways.
Re:Bless Slashdot (Score:1)
Really ugly Replica document I created in 1993 [gondwanaland.com].
Re:Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading (Score:1)
In a vacuum, you're right, none of these are deficiencies of the file format itself. Web publishers don't live in a vacuum. If they did, PDF's market dominance wouldn't be a factor either.
Given these realities, I think it's pretty hard to dispute that most sites that publish PDF could improve usability by publishing their documents as HTML instead.
Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading (Score:2)
Re:TeX / LaTeX (Score:3)
(A little off-topic: IMHO, Docbook is a better choice for this sort of thing -- TeX/LaTeX are nice, but they are showing their age. I have written a thesis and many articles in LaTeX, and have found Docbook to be far superior even if a bit immature).
I doubt he wants alternative PDF WRITERS (Score:5)
Bless Slashdot (Score:5)
The answer is no.
In the mid-'90s, there were a couple of competing technologies, each with its own proprietary viewer. Among the worst was Corel's Barista, which used JVM 1.0 applets for a viewer. It was a nice idea that the early capabilities of Java made unworkable.
Among the best was Common Ground, which was a lot like Acrobat with the added advantage of having a very lightweight viewer. For people without the plugin or standalone viewer, you could distribute Mac and Windows executables of the document with a self-contained viewer that was in the ballpark og 40K in size. By 2.0, they also had a viewer applet in Java. However, the quality of the documents produced wasn't as good as Acrobat's. It worked well for word processor documents and spreadsheets, but wasn't good for line art and desktop-publishing output. Hummingbird acquired them and tried to turn it into a universal viewer technology for its document management system. After a while, unable to catch up with Adobe in terms of document quality, they discontinued it.
Net-it Now was another such tool. Again, it wasn't as good as Acrobat. Its niche was the use of Java (and later, ActiveX) viewers. Since Adobe eventually got Acrobat Reader distribution almost universal, the product didn't really have a compelling niche and it too was discontinued. I think parts of it live on in some Lotus/IBM products like SmartSuite.
Postscript files (compressed or not) are not a viable substitute unless you're only distributing your content to Slashdot readers and Unix sysadmins. Whereas some 95% of desktop users have a PDF viewer (usually Adobe's), fewer than 5% of people have a Postscript viewer, and many of those would have trouble making it work with a downloaded file.
Getting rid of your PDFs is a nice political statement, but shitty business practice. PDFs--especially properly hyperlinked ones--are the only decent way to distribute print materials like brochures and manuals reliably to end users. Make people download Ghostscript (with its awful installers), the Ghostscript core font set (with its manual installation process) and GSView? You try telling someone who is paying you thousands of dollars for your products or services to do that. I won't.
If you want to make a point, go ahead and add some (polite, professional) text to your pages with PDF download links noting that PDF is a convenient format regrettably put out by a company opposed to freedom of speech that also produces insecure products unfit for use with sensitive information. Offer a polite link to, say, the EFF's website for more information.
For your own part, maybe you can make a point of making any new PDFs without Adobe's tools. Say, ps2pdf if you don't need hyperlinking or color profile support. Or libpdf-based tools and libraries (from Perl, PHP, C, whatever) for PDFs you generate on the fly from raw content.
But don't get shrill and don't make it hard for your users and potential customers to get what they need in an easy and timely way. That just makes you look like an amateur and an idiot.
Alternative formats. (Score:2)
If page typesetting _is_ important, how about zipped postscript files? Postscript files are huge, but compressing them solves that problem adequately. This is transparent enough to the user to be acceptable (click on it, and WinZip pops up a nice window with the uncompressed file listed in it).
If you're using the postscript option, it's probably wise to have a link to the Windows version of GhostView on the same page that provides the documents, to minimize viewing hassles. Maybe WinZip too, though most people who download things will have that installed already.
Links to Linux and Mac binaries would be useful too, but Windows support should be the first design priority if this is a commercial site (by sheer force of demographics).
Re:FOP from Apache does it (Score:2)
I'm using DocBook/XML with the Jade tool chain. But as soon as Xalan lets me resolve public identifiers locally, I'll switch to it. Until then, some of us are behind firewalls, have slow connections, etc.
Re:Alternative formats. (Score:2)
Re:Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading (Score:1)
While Nielsen is fairly widely respected, this particular editorial of his is an absolute embarassment.
His criticisms fall into two categories:
None of these, of course, is a deficiency of the file format itself, and all are easily addressed. I'm not an apologist of any sort, but misrepresentations like this are not particularly useful.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Re:PDF Conversion Features (Score:1)
Some search engines have this capability built in, including the one which I work on professionally: AltaVista Enterprise Search [altavista.com].
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Online viewer (Score:1)
Re:I doubt he wants alternative PDF WRITERS (Score:2)
If only, somewhere along the line, someone had allowed HTML to define something as simple as a page break, this would work. Without this most basic function, HTML is and will remain useless for both document delivery and as a word-processing format.
Why can't we use this to solve an OLD problem? (Score:3)
Indeed, this is actually a very good question, and one which I have thought about for years. The "here's why" boils down to two main reasons:
1) HTML has no concept of physical page representation, including most importantly, page breaks. This breaks HTML as a reasonable alternative for documents that you want to print out, or simply view as they would be printed.
2) More importantly, there is no reasonable and accepted way to bundle up all the components of an HTML page and distrubute them as a single lump. This is a non-trivial problem, since many modern single web pages consist of dozens or even hundreds of component parts (scripts, graphics, HTML code, style sheets, etc.)
There appears to be no good way to fix problem #1 without making changes to HTML, or at least propagating enough clients that add the functionality to see this sort of thing take off. Given that HTML looks frozen in time and all new stuff will be XML, with its notoriously too-flexible self description, I'm not holding my breath on this one.
Still, HTML could be much more useful as an information dissemination format if it were simply possible to address problem #2. There's some good news here: It's been *possible* to do this for years.
The obvious way to deal with bundling up an arbitrary bunch of webpages would be to use the capabilities of MIME, which was invented just for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I've only ever found one mail/browser combo that was capable of making this work: The Novita Mail client from the now-defunct company of the same name, which was based on Sun's old HotJava web browser. (Which was both its strength and its weakness - Sun really hurt a lot of early Java adopters by urging them to use HotJava as the base for their applications, and then abondoning the platform and not upgrading it. That's too bad, because the idea was good, even if the implementation was not. Netscape was supposed to pick up the Hot Java ball with thier Javagator, but they still haven't even managed a usable next gen conventional browser let alone a good Java-based browser...)
In any case, everything that's needed is there, with one tiny exception: relative URLs need to be able to include pointers to specific MIME body parts in an MHTML construct in some reasonably standard and predictable way. Note that this works in Netscape and IE for things such as images, but that there appears to be no way to point to a "sub-page" of HTML code. You can easily verify this for yourself with Netscape or another mail client/web browser: It's pretty easy to create MIME messages by hand that contain all the correct parts, but so far as I know, Novita is the only browser ever to *properly* handle true multipart MHTML attachments - it was even capable of drag-and-drop insertion of live java applets into a message. (Note that both Netscape and IE claim MHTML support, but niether can perform this basic function - unless a recent IE has fixed this...)
In the case of an image embedded in an MHTML message, the relevant URL looks like this:
This works fine for images, but does not work for pointing to another page of HTML, even if you carefully construct the MHTML by hand in all the ways that would seem to make sense.
So I suppose the second problem spawns two questions:
1) Does anyone know how to do this?
2) Does anyone know of a mail/browser combo that already knows how to do this?
If the answer to both of the above is "no", then I think we should start looking to get this functionality into open source mailtools, ASAP, as it would dramatically increase the utility of these tools by allowing entire web site "trees" to be easily e-mailed, in some cases replacing PDFs and the like with something even better. Comments?
SVG (Score:3)
In the main I agree with one of the other posters who suggested XSL-FO. If we had a 'native' XSL-FO viewer, and a document 'format' consisting of a (tar.gz) archive of xml body text, xsl styling, plus embedded objects, then we'd have something very close to a winner. However if you wanted to abandon PS and TrueType you'd have to embed all your fonts as SVG too... urk...
-Baz
Re:Boycotts are pointless (Score:1)
Large corporations bought their favorite laws through lawmakers and going through them is the way to remove the law.
However, by making an example of Adobe, you discorage other companies from trying similar tactics. Notice how Adobe is backing off so far and so quickly? This indicates that they and others will think long and hard about trying something similar in the future.
The DMCA is their way of restricting our otherwise legal rights to fair use by using technology. A Boycott is our way of restricting their otherwise legal right to prosecute by using PR.
Form generation (Score:1)
If you don't want to or can't install Ghostscript, take a look here: http://www.babinszki.com/distiller/ [babinszki.com]
One thing I haven't been able to find yet, is the ablity to create FDF's (Acrobat Forms). Any ideas out there?
PStill (Score:1)
If you want to get the best out of it, you can install a few PostScript fonts in its "fonts" directory. For example if you have a Sun or SGI around, these come with high-quality PostScript fonts (DPS). Copy these fonts in your PStill "fonts" directory and you will get very good quality.
I assume most Adobe software comes with good PS fonts as well, so if you have even an old version of Adobe Illustrator for example you have a good library of fonts.
PDF Conversion Features (Score:1)
Specifically, I wanted to extract the text to index it for a search engine. Maybe someone could create an open source utility to convert a PDF into a more viewer friendly format?
If you're going to use ps2pdf (Score:2)
See ghostscript webpage [wisc.edu].
Re:I doubt he wants alternative PDF WRITERS (Score:1)
Re:GIF -- PNG, PDF -- ? (Score:3)
Re:SVG (Score:1)
http://nilo.stolte.free.fr/SVG.html#examples [stolte.free.fr]
Requires an SVG viewer. [apache.org]
Re:GIF -- PNG, PDF -- SVG ? (Score:2)
Now you've got a document format that can be created in anything that outputs SVG (or anything that can be converted to SVG) including text editors.
Next step, displaySVG (hell might as well go all the way) as an alternative to X as a cross platform windowing system.
Dave
Re:ps2pdf / GNU GhostScript (Score:1)
Re:I doubt he wants alternative PDF WRITERS (Score:1)
Re:I doubt he wants alternative PDF WRITERS (Score:2)
actually he does ask "what PDF-creating applications, especially Open Source ones, have people had either successes (to emulate) or failures (to avoid)?"
How about good, old-fashioned HTML+images?
The problem with html is that it doesn't look the same from one platform to the next. Pdf and postscript both accomplish this. You can print out a pdf datasheet and it'll look exactly like what the author intended.
Re:DjVu? (Score:1)
XFDL (Score:2)
Although it's not remotely in the same league of complexity as PDF (or any of the Postscripts), eXtensible Form Definition Language (XFDL) is an XML-based schema set that will allow the precise placement of document components (as well as arbitrary base64 encoded bin files) within an XML document. The proper tools can be used to display and handle the forms, as well as print them (although without the extensive printer involvement of Postscript...it's going to be pure PCL).
The latest W3C note is here [w3.org]. Check it out, then go look at the tools out there. This sort of thing could well become the new "generic" format for portable documents.
Re:TeX / LaTeX (Score:1)
Print to file and then ps2pdf (Score:5)
ps2pdf ships with most Linux distributions as part of Ghostscript [ghostscript.com] I believe. Just print to a file and then convert it.
On the windows end, you might want to check out FreePDF [over.to]. It gives you instructions on how to mix the previously mentioned ghostscript, as well as a few other tools, to give you the ability to print to pdf format from any windows application.
Re:SVG (Score:1)
I curious in what way SVG (Scalable *Vector* Graphics) would help with this problem.
Re:SVG (Score:1)
Re:ps2pdf / GNU GhostScript (Score:3)
PDF is basically an extension of PostScript. It has some additional features, such as the ability to include internal and external hyperlinks in a document and support for compression of the document file. Apparently, [citationsoftware.com] the program control constructs in PDF are more limited than those in PS.
The fact that gv can read both makes me think that they are infact very similar.
Indeed.
Also, if they are similar, why doesn't adobe add ps support to it's acrobat reader?
Beats me.
More PDF versus PostScript info (Score:3)
Boycotts are pointless (Score:3)
The problem here isn't Adobe, it's the LAW. Maybe you should be writing letters to the Congress or raising awareness of the issue outside of the Slashbot crowd.
There is no alternative to PDF out there. PDF is a great technology that has made my job alot easier.
This boycott is a childish waste of time and energy. The fact that no big-name supporters outside of the Open Source or computer worlds have joined make it nothing more than a joke.
Re:I doubt he wants alternative PDF WRITERS (Score:1)
I think it is about time for a backward compatible html update to allow for accurate formatting.
Please, no. There are reasons the Web is not WYSISYG (accessibility leaps to mind). If you're so much of a control freak that you need to guarantee that every user sees exactly the same thing, then ditch HTML altogether and just use images.
DjVu? (Score:2)
Re:DjVu? (Score:2)
Some resources (Score:3)
Time for an OSS solution... (Score:1)
Perhaps the alternative could be a subset of OpenOffice's XML based open document formats?
LaTeX (Score:5)
There are LaTeX processors for most platforms. A quick Google [google.com] search can be rather useful.
As for viewing LaTeX files, you can convert them to many popular formats - HTML, postscript, PDF, RTF, DOC... - or use a browser plugin. IBM's TechExplorer (http://www.software.ibm.com/network/techexplorer/ ) [ibm.com] allows you to view TeX, LaTeX and MathML documents in IE or Netscape.
LaTeX is much more flexible than any other format I've tried so far. It can do books, articles, reports, and slides - and these are all standard packages. The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network [ctan.org] is to LaTeX as CPAN is to Perl - an immensely useful repository of cool stuff. =)
It's not too hard to learn, either. You can pick up the Not-So Short Guide to LaTeX (http://wso.williams.edu/how/lshort2e) [williams.edu] or any of the other tutorials on the Net.
LaTeX is beautiful. I haven't had to use anything else for my papers ever since I discovered the joys of LaTeX. <g>
Not True. (Score:1)
While GIFs are bad because they use software patented technology, no such thing exists in PDF.
Unfortunately this just isn't the case. From Adobe's website:
Adobe has a number of patents and patents pending, covering technology that is disclosed in the Portable Document Format (PDF) Specification, version 1.3 and later, as documented in PDF Reference and associated technical notes. For details, see the Patent Clarification Notice [adobe.com].
Adobe automatically license PDF to people who want to create programs that implement the specification. They do this so that they can go after you if you do not implement it "properly".
Brian.Re:Alternative formats. (Score:2)
The first line of a random .ps file on my system:
%!PS-Adobe-2.0
--
FOP from Apache does it (Score:1)
Of course, you need Apache, Jakarta, Xerces, and so on. A bit tricky to mount, but all free.
Re:GIF -- PNG, PDF -- ? (Score:2)
PDF is really a good, open standard (like almost any technology that came out of Adobe). We should try to have complete, free implementations of the PDF format ... so that nobody would have to buy the Adobe products
I don't mean to troll, but I find the above statement curious. It seems to (inadvertently) support the position of some companies that open standards are bad for business. If this is the case, what's the incentive for Adobe, or any other company, to develop a good, transparent standard?
Alternative PDF Creator (Score:1)
http://www.jawssystems.com/products/products_fs.h
Personally, I don't see how you can patent a file format like GIF......you can patent data but not the layout.
The Japanese don't charge royalties every time someone writes a Haiku!
Just use postscript (Score:1)
Re:I doubt he wants alternative PDF WRITERS (Score:1)
Re:DjVu? (Score:1)
TeX / LaTeX (Score:5)
The down-side of LaTeX is that it is not a WYSIWYG editor, but the Linux / Unix community should not mind that part of it too much
Check out http://www.latex-project.org for more details. I highly recommend the MikTeX win32 implementation (http://www.miktex.org).
StarOffice to pdf (Score:3)
This allows you to create very nice pdf documents using star office 5.2 and print directly to pdf. This solution can be used cross platform. For the creation of pdf's without having to train people to use the CLI.
The drawback here is that star office is not truly open source and I have not tried this with open office.