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Unipage - A PDF Alternative?

Posted by Hemos on Mon Feb 20, 2006 11:37 AM
from the uphill-battle dept.
Software The Internet
A reader writes: "Unipage recently released a beta version of its Unipage Unifier. The Unipage encoding is a way to encode a full page with its images, CSS, Javascript, Flash, and whatnot, into just one HTML file. The 'Unipage Unifier' program instantly turns any online or local page into a 'Unipage' that can be viewed directly in a browser. It saves the mess of files when you normally save a complete web page, but maybe the bigger scoop is that now people can use 'Unipages' to send content rich documents instead of PDF. But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page. Together with any program that can export into HTML you can get fully styled, dynamic, portable documents instantly. And it's free." Good luck taking down the installed base of PDF.
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  • *Not* a PDF Killer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by XorNand (517466) * on Monday February 20 2006, @11:39AM (#14761567)
    But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page.
    Someone didn't do their homework. Javascript is used extensively in PDFs to provide interactive functionality. Does this new produce also:
    - Support vector-based documents, allowing both text and graphics to scale to any size?
    - Provide a way to cryptographicly sign a document?
    - Attempt to tackle the "portable" in PDF? Are you kidding me? It looks like a Windows-only download.
    - Support e-book DRM features?
    - etc, etc...

    Actually, nowhere on the product's website do they claim to be a "PDF killer". It just looks like an independent developer's attempt to make a cool little (beta) application. Interesting, but I'm left to wonder why I'm reading about this on the front page of Slashdot? Not to mention IE has this functionality for years [google.com].

    • Re:*Not* a PDF Killer (Score:5, Funny)

      by legirons (809082) on Monday February 20 2006, @02:46PM (#14762893)
      You forgot some requirements:
        - must require zooming in lots of times to be readable, until the page doesn't fit on your screen
        - must support two-column text, so you read down, up/across, and down again
        - must behave differently near pagebreaks, so the scrollwheel suddenly skips 3 pages while the down-cursor stops responding
        - should ideally make your browser crash or stop responding
        - support DRM and ebook features, such as "being viewable only in a browser which displays adverts constantly", "requires connecting to the internet for no good reason", and "uses all your bandwidth downloading lists of people that it shouldn't show the book to"

      Other than that, yeah, I agree that we should ignore it on the assumption that it doesn't support vector graphics, and even if it did, PDF would be better than either it or SVG, because it's written by Adobe, and as we all know, professionals only use Adobe software, and anything free is for losers

      Sorry, couldn't resist. The pro-Adobe guys on slashdot are becoming a bit of a standing joke nowadays. Get back to your powerful, enterprise-level industry-standard bitmap editor you slackers, stop reading slashdot when you're being paid $450,000 per hour for your elite photography skills!

        • Re:*Not* a PDF Killer (Score:5, Interesting)

          by KagatoLNX (141673) <kagato&souja,net> on Tuesday February 21 2006, @12:05AM (#14765531) Homepage
          PDF != Adobe?

          Tell that to Dmitri Skylarov.

          Like it or not, to download the PDF spec, you have to agree not to "violate" the DRM, among other things. Of course, you could try to clean room reverse engineer it, but that would kill the portable part fairly quickly, since the DMCA would most likely cover "circumventing DRM" even in a clean room implementation.

          De facto, PDF == Adobe.

          Also, PDFs are not made to simply represent the print layout. While that is their most beneficial feature, PDF does a lot more. It provides bookmark navigation and can be used to reformat the document to different page sizes when the document is properly generated.

          As for "read only", well, I've been paid hourly to modify a PDF'd contract prior to signing (which was perfectly legal and delightfully unexpected by the other party). Once of the happiest moments in my life was removing the section that said the contract was void if it was modified. It was an eye-opening and kind of surreal moment. It was also the first time I ever heard a lawyer giggle...

          From a technical perspective (having tried to manually work with PDF at a file level) its horrible. The format more closely resembles FAT than PostScript (contrary to popular belief--I am painfully serious about this). It's broken into blocks with a weird allocation table. Originally, it appears the idea was to make it editable (although "editing" a PDF in anything is pretty painful). As such, even though I don't currently recommend much other than PDF for my customers, I don't feel very much love towards it either.

          In the spirit of offering solutions instead of only complaints, I like SVG quite a bit, SVG-P (standard with SVG 2.0) more, and actually find XSL-FO the easiest to work with.I currently crank out a few invoices per month and some finanacial reports with XSL-FO and FOP. Even though they end up in PDF, I really wish XSL-FO was the de facto standard instead of PDF...

      • Re:*Not* a "/." murderer. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by malsdavis (542216) * on Monday February 20 2006, @12:06PM (#14761806)
        Or perhaps it was made a slashdot story because many slashdot readers like to hear about new programs and projects allowing innovative new approaches to computing problems (in this case rich document transfer).

  • But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page.

    Of course, had you bothered to research the subject, you'd know that PDF has supported animations and scripting with JavaScript within a document for many years now. I'm not saying the Unipage won't be useful thing. But to claim it's superior to PDF in areas where it's clearly not isn't going to help its cause. Not only that, but the two products have different goals anyway. PDF is, and I suspect will remain, the best way to send a document where the design and layout is important. It should render the same on all PDF viewers, and can contain richer formatting than can be expressed in HTML/CSS. A Unipage will probably be easier to author[1] than a complex PDF, but will only accurately preserve content, not formatting. Use whichever one is right for the task at hand. If anything, I'd say it's more of a rival to Word documents than PDFs.

    [1] In fact, I suspect that will be its major selling point. Although you can do wonderful things with PDF, most people don't because a) they don't know about them, and b) the Adobe authoring tools are expensive, and hence not widespread.

    • Re:Yet another ill informed opinion about PDF (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jordan Catalano (915885) on Monday February 20 2006, @11:43AM (#14761608) Homepage
      Not to mention, do you really want scripting support in a portable document format? Isn't the whole point that you're able to view the same document, on screen and printed out, across a wide range of platforms, and they'll all look identical? Dynamic content is throwing a wrench in those works.
      • Hell... relying on different implementations of CSS is going to ruin true portability.

        Still, this could be nice for those times you need to send webpage to a client that can't figure out how to unzip files properly.

      • Not to mention, do you really want scripting support in a portable document format? Isn't the whole point that you're able to view the same document, on screen and printed out, across a wide range of platforms, and they'll all look identical? Dynamic content is throwing a wrench in those works.

        I don't see why, if the semantics of the dynamic content are clearly defined. So long as the dynamic content works the same on all those different platforms, that's fine.

        As for the "on-screen and printed out" issu

    • It is even worse than this. PDF, or the portable document format, defines pretty exactly how things will be rendered given certain instructions. This means that the document will look pretty much the same no matter the device on which it is rendered. The limitiation is that the device is assumed to be in some from of print.

      HTML, OTOH, is a text markup language. It only defined certains classes and the certain relations among those classes. It does not explicitely define how things are rendered, and i

  • Nothing really new and has nothing to do with PDF...

    In Firefox, you can use Mozilla Archive Format extension [mozilla.org], which can also save pages in Internet Explorer's MHTML format, to do the same thing.

    Besides, as it is said in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the reason for PDF is to render exactly the same regardless of its origin or destination and they are most appropriately used to encode the exact look of a document in a device-independent way. Unipage suffers from the common problem of webpages rendering differently in different browsers.

  • Waaaay behind (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FortKnox (169099) * on Monday February 20 2006, @11:40AM (#14761576) Homepage Journal
    Adobe has recently released its Intelligent Document Platform [adobe.com] which gives PDFs the ability to use javascript and imbed things within their PDFs, along with the ability to use submission and make PDFs dynamic on the web.

    And considering that Adobe recently purchased Macromedia, its only a matter of time before they have flash embedded and working solidly in PDFs.

    Unipage is already waaay behind (like Hemos said, they don't have the solid installbase), and will have to come up with something extremely impressive that Adobe won't be able to copy.

    I see this as vaporware before it even comes to release 1.0.

    • Re:Waaaay behind (Score:4, Informative)

      by anothy (83176) on Monday February 20 2006, @12:29PM (#14761975) Homepage
      I see this as vaporware before it even comes to release 1.0.
      you keep using that word. i do not think it means what you think it means.

      the point of "vaporware" is generally that it never gets to 1.0. indeed, most would say that it never hits 0.1, at least not in a form anyone ever gets to look at. the next Duke Nukem is the canonical example - people've been talking about it for years, but hardly anybody expects to ever actually see it. as long as the app is real/available and more-or-less does what it claims, it's not vaporware, no matter how useless (not, incidentally, that i'm endorsing a position that this particular app is useless; i'm reserving judgement on that).

  • Functionality (Score:5, Funny)

    by nagora (177841) on Monday February 20 2006, @11:41AM (#14761579)
    But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Viruses)

  • RFC 2557 - MHTML (Score:5, Informative)

    by NutscrapeSucks (446616) on Monday February 20 2006, @11:42AM (#14761603)
    There's already a perfectly good standard for this -- MIME-encapsulated HTML or MHTML. It also has the advantage of being implemented in that little browser with 85% marketshare, Internet Explorer.

    The Mozilla bug for implementing this is 40873, not that voting for it seems to do any good (bug is still 'NEW' after almost 6 years).
    • Voting on Mozilla bugs never does anything. It's opium for the masses - it gives you the feeling that you can do something and make a difference, but it's really just a convenient way for the developers to channel user input into an area where it's easy to ignore.

  • Can already do this pretty easily with Mozilla... (Score:4, Informative)

    by CTho9305 (264265) on Monday February 20 2006, @11:44AM (#14761620) Homepage
    It's already easy to embed things into a single file with Gecko-based browsers (e.g. SeaMonkey [mozilla.org], Firefox, etc) - all you'd have to do is grab the data that makes up the various files in the page (images, swfs, etc) and use "data:" URLs. For an example of a page that already embeds some images directly into the HTML, view this page [seamonkey.at] with a Gecko-based browser. If you look at the source, you'll see some images inlined right into the HTML. I'd imagine it would not be difficult to make an extension that does what Unipage is currently doing. If all the content is hosted on the same domain, you could probably do it almost trivially in the page itself with some XMLHttpRequests to fetch the contents of images and other objects and inline them into document.innerHTML before saving it to a file.

  • feature? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tverbeek (457094) on Monday February 20 2006, @11:45AM (#14761629) Homepage
    Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript),

    You say that as if it were necessarily a good thing.

  • premature slashdottage (Score:3, Insightful)

    by matt me (850665) on Monday February 20 2006, @12:03PM (#14761780)
    PDF is an open standard as is, and certainly a good one, for a start. For saving documents (paper) in a way you can be guaranteed will render the same anywhere else. RTFA, and Unipage is entirely different and in no way competing project, revelant to saving webpages as "one-file", in an .mhtml way. Is that a common problem anyway?

    But yes, even if misinformed, they aren't yet ready to take on Adobe Acrobat. from http://unipage.org/links.html [unipage.org]

    Links
    Free software for creating dynamic web pages:
    coming soon

  • Hello? This is new?? (Score:3, Informative)

    by pair-a-noyd (594371) on Monday February 20 2006, @12:09PM (#14761828)
    KDE Konqueror --> Web Archiver

    Saves webpages with .war extentsion (actually tar files)
    I use this frequently to save pages before they vanish into nothingness,
    I also email them to friends and family and they can view them on their machines
    exactly as they originally appeared even if the original pages and or domain vaporize.

    This has been in KDE for sometime now..

  • Different Purposes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by coreyb (125522) <<coreyb> <at> <j2t.cjb.net>> on Monday February 20 2006, @12:49PM (#14762133)
    Has everyone forgotten that the purpose of html is that the pages look different on different devices? The idea being that the information is what's important and the device should know how to best present it (given sufficient metadata). This is the exact opposite of the purpose of pdf, which looks the same no matter what. Of course some data could benefit from having part shown always the same and other parts shown according to device, and that's what this may do.

      • Re:HUH (Score:5, Insightful)

        by andreyw (798182) on Monday February 20 2006, @11:51AM (#14761685) Homepage
        Umm no. Have you ever seen the power of the math package on LaTeX? I can create horrendously complicated expressions? HTML? You probably mean Math ML - this depends on browser support, and, (you guessed it), rendering depends on the browser.

        As others pointed out - you lose the whole "looks same everywhere" aspect once you move away from DVI, PS and PDF. I mean for crying out loud - you have to put *hacks* in your CSS just to get the same page looking right between IE and Mozilla-based browsers. This isn't a solution.

    • Re:No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. La (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pieroxy (222434) on Monday February 20 2006, @11:52AM (#14761687) Homepage
      Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything normally possible in a web page

      Superior or different? This looks quite nice, but how can one compare this with PDF? This is just... something different.

      PDF is a "portable document format". A way to port a (static) document so that it will be viewed and printed identically everywhere.

      HTML is a way of describing documents so that they can be viewed and interacted with on a lot of platforms. It will NOT look the same on all platforms, it will NOT print well on all platforms (as a matter of fact, it will probably print very poorly on most platforms)

      Different goals, different products. Why is that everyone wants the "do-it-all" product?
      --
      Krazy Kat Online [ignatzmouse.net]

      • Re:No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. La (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2006, @12:00PM (#14761759)
        This begs the question - if the purpose is to excape a spawn of satan software like Adobe's PDF & its viewer, why create a format that can imbed web plugins, especially ones like flash?

        If Unipage did replace PDF, we could expect a much worse time of things, when every Joe Average and business marketinghead in sundry attempts to embed Flash, Shockwave and Java into documents.
          • HTML is for displaying content regardless of how it appears, in whatever the best format is for a program that is browsing the web.

            PDF is for making a file that creates a copy of a printed page. Very useful for some things, completely inappropriate for others.

          • HTML is the be-all... not (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Merdalors (677723) on Monday February 20 2006, @01:17PM (#14762328)
            prefer to make a PDF document of something when they could just display it in HTML

            Really? I'd be interested in how you can do this [progenysoftware.com] in HTML. Note that although the link is a JPG, in the PDF format, it's all vector, no raster. When you zoom in the PDF document, the fonts remain crisp and sharp

            I'm looking for a Windows driver that will capture my GDI calls and render to HTML. Any suggestions?

            • Re: SVG (Score:4, Informative)

              by L.Bob.Rife (844620) on Monday February 20 2006, @11:57PM (#14765510)
              SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics

              Vectors graphics turned into a small XML file, coming soon to a browser near you, unless you use Firefox 1.5 in which case, you've got it already.

              Just needs a little more time to mature and stabalize and it will be very commonplace.
            • I agree -- an open source Acrobat replacement would be great.

              I can't come up with any sort of burning hatred of PDF, as some people seem able to. Sure, back in the day, when I had a computer with 32 or 64MB of RAM, opening one by accident really sucked. Up until I figured out that there were better things than Adobe Acrobat Reader, it was still really annoying. But after Apple built PDF creation and reading into Mac OS, a lot of my dislike faded. I didn't hate the format, I just hated the reader.

              So similarly, I wonder if there were better creation/editing/management tools other than Adobe's, if people would have less objections to it, and might not keep going down the blind alley of finding PDF alternatives?

              After all, there is a PDF alternative, it's called DVI. In fact I think it predates PDF. But it's installed base is pretty close to zero (it's mostly only used by people who have LaTeX on Linux installed, and who for some reason aren't outputting directly to PDF). So it's not as though there aren't any alternatives. It's just that those alternatives don't really offer any compelling reasons to switch from PDF.

              This Unipage business seems as though it's just a standardized web archive format, which makes me immediately wonder why they didn't just use one of the existing archive formats. (e.g., the Mac OS / Safari archive, or the Konqueror ".war" file.) Just on first glance it seems as though it's a reinvention of the wheel, although this time with the "ability" to encapsulate Flash, which is a malfeature in my opinion.

              Anyway, PDF is here and it's here to stay -- it's been built into a lot of standalone devices (document scanners, fax systems) and I can't imagine that the format is really much of a moving target anymore, at least in its more basic implementations. But you're absolutely right: there is for some reason an odd shortage of FOSS manipulation tools for dealing with PDFs, at least that I've used so far.

              • Re:Open Source Acrobat (Score:4, Informative)

                by hpa (7948) on Monday February 20 2006, @02:43PM (#14762872) Homepage
                There are a number of Open Source Acrobat replacements; GhostScript can be used instead of Acrobat Distiller to generate PDF (including with PDF-specific contents), and xpdf for display.

      • Re:No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. La (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Lumpy (12016) on Monday February 20 2006, @12:16PM (#14761866) Homepage
        It can not even compare. the #1 use for PDF's here is the ability for management to sign the documents and send them upwards. We can do thousands of things with PDF that this looks like it cant not be done. There is no PHP module to create these as well as a myriad of other issues making it extremely far away from even approaching the useability of PDF.

        Embedding Flash and JS is a negative as far as I am concerned. Last thing I need is a damned JS app buried in the document to try and contact a server to let the creator I opened the document.
      • Why is that everyone wants the "do-it-all" product?

        Its not that. The problem is that neither format is right for what people want out of a document format: editability and universal layout. HTML is easy to edit, but looks different depending on what you use to view it.
        PDF, on the other hand, looks the same but isn't easy to edit.

        Of course, this solution provides nothing new. You can encode images, flash files, etc. directly into the page as javascript variables that can be read by Mozilla-based browsers
        • The problem is that neither format is right for what people want out of a document format: editability and universal layout. HTML is easy to edit, but looks different depending on what you use to view it. PDF, on the other hand, looks the same but isn't easy to edit.

          PDF isn't supposed to be easily editable, and that's the point. If you're going to easy editability, a Microsoft Office format is pretty much the standard. If you're saving something in a PDF, it's to make sure the person you are sending it t
          • Microsoft Office format is pretty much the standard.

            No, it's not. Any given MS document only renders correctly with the Microsoft Office edition in which it was made, and in no other renderer does it render perfectly. Further, this rendering is not guaranteed to be the same because there is no specification. Also, you can't embed fonts in it.
            To top it off, even RTF, which Microsoft renders a spec for, isn't correctly rendered by any version of Word. So essentially there is no standard for any Microsoft document format.

            To go further, though, office documents are not easily editable! In fact, they're almost more difficult to edit than PDFs are! Its a closed-source, binary file format with lots of quirks. You're not going to be editing it with a 50KB WYSIWYG editor like you can with HTML.

            The point isn't that they're not easy to edit. The point is that they always look the same no matter how use 'em. Otherwise, Adobe wouldn't have released Acrobat (which can not only write, but also edit PDFs), would they? The only reason that they're not easy to edit is because the document format is a functional subset of PS, and that is more of a drawing format with built-in text writing than it is a document format. Its a technical limitation, not a designed feature. Acrobat would be a real cash-cow if Adobe could suddenly create a decent document writer for it that competes with Word.

            Yeah, a do-all format should be easily edited and universally standard. But sometimes the do-all product isn't the best. If I send a file in PDF, it's in PDF for a reason. If I just wanted to make sure it was readable, I'd send it as .DOC.

            I take it you're not a programmer. Or if you are, then you're a Microsoft junkie. There are PDF libraries for virtually every programming language for free or cheap. There are almost no DOC generating libraries. Even if there were, doc is not a standard as I have said.
    • Agreed. Upstarts like this NEED mac and linux versions more than most products do, because I feel like Mac and Linux users tend to be more willing to try products like this out.

    • Re:No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. La (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ucklak (755284) on Monday February 20 2006, @12:15PM (#14761862)
      Seriously lame.

      Try getting a magazine to print a spread or ad from this.

      Sorry folks, print media requires PDF-x1 standards and that won't be going away.
      It was too long a fight to get away from INDesign/Quark specs and PDF is actually a nice format.
      With that said, why the hell would I want to look at 2 software versions of an ad to approve it when I can see the exact PDF the printer will use?

      The other thing I saw as a narrow viewpoint was this quote
      There's no need to install special software to view Unipages (as is the case with PDF)


      Isn't Windows the only OS that requires the 'special' software to view PDF's?

      Most major picks of Linux has 3 PDF viewers and Mac has Preview out of the box.
      The only thing that Mac Preview (as of Panther) doesn't do is PDF watermarking (acrobat feature only - Like permissions in corporate Office 2003).

      I think all Unipage was trying to do was get away from the PDF plugin annoyance.

      • Re:No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. La (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hackstraw (262471) * on Monday February 20 2006, @01:14PM (#14762312) Homepage
        I think all Unipage was trying to do was get away from the PDF plugin annoyance.

        Just for the record, in 2006 here are things that web developers should NOT do anymore.

        Open up links in new windows, unless its for a reason. The only reason I can think of is when sites like CNN open up external links to indicate that you are leaving their domain, and they are not responsible for the external site's content or whatnot. (Its still annoying, but it has a valid reason).

        NEVER, EVER, use plugins. EVER!

        All content like PDFs and Java JAR files, should have a mime type to just download the file for offline viewing. The same with flash, or the new plugin of the week.

        Am I the only person who uses the web and downloads files? Am I the only person on the web who knows how to open up a link in a new window or tab? I find some websites just to be annoying to navigate. I can't figure out their rhyme or reason for opening up in a new window or not (sometimes it appears random), and I can't figure out to close the window to go back to the previous page or to hit the back button. Less is more.

        • Re:No Mac version. Less functions than Acrobat. La (Score:4, Informative)

          by izomiac (815208) on Monday February 20 2006, @02:53PM (#14762936) Homepage
          Corollary: Use basic HTML for navigation menus.

          That means, no flash and if you want to use javascript then make sure that it works without it. I, for one, middle click on any links that I want to visit, then close the current tab and look at each in turn. It's a lot more convienant than hitting "Back" every page. But with flash this doesn't work (and I care far less about the links sliding in from the side when I load the page than I do about actually using them). Also, if you solely rely on a plugin for navigation, what happens when people don't have that plugin? I use BeOS as my primary OS and guess which popular browser plugins are not availible for it? (BTW, a lot of people also disable those plugins or don't have them installed.)

          With javascript use something like: href="blah.html" target="_blank" onclick="window.open(); return: false;". Don't use: href="#" onclick=... or href="javascript:window.open(). (My HTML/JS might be a bit rusty, but you get the idea.) Nothing is more annoying (or confusing the first time it happens) then middle clicking five links and opening the same page or blank pages five times.
      • PDF is built into OS X... Preview is just a handy little program to display them. That means that EVERY app on OS X can easily open, view and create PDF documents. There are PDF libraries for Linux too. Windows is just caught in the stone age.
    • I agree with you. It seems like everything people are saying is how it doesn't stack up to all the slick shiney features of PDF. The problem I see is that people are using PDF's far too much for things that don't need to be PDF. I can't count how many times I go to a college athletic website to look at season stats or roster information and almost everything on the site is in PDF. For the same size of page in html the stupid page would be smaller/load faster. I want to puke when I see the acrobat reader splash screen come on when I want to look at a file that would amount to less than a printed page. PDF's may be great for some applications, but most applications I see them used for would be better suited as standard web pages.

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