Microsoft to Introduce PDF competitor 'Metro'

RustNeverSleeps writes "Computerworld reports that Microsoft will be including a new document format called 'Metro' with Longhorn. Apparently, Metro is intended to be a competitor to Adobe's PDF and Postscript formats. The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML. Can we expect Microsoft to do this right? If they do, I think it could be a good thing." Reader gsfprez is less optimistic: "... I noticed the main, and probably most important difference between old and busted PDF and new-hotness Metro (besides the Queer Eye styled name)... 'We will offer products based on this next generation RIP technology and make them available under license to printer manufacturers and software integrators worldwide.' Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files. Good luck with that, guys."

Royalty free license

If royalty free licenses were enough to get open source reimplementations out of legal murkiness, then no one would be complaining about Mono. I'll suspend judgement on this one until we see what the terms of the license are and what patents Microsoft holds on it.

Re:Royalty free license

am I wrong in thinking that "Royalty Free" doesn't mean you don't have to pay, just that you don't have to pay per copy - what if it's say $100k to play? then FOSS is SOL

MS negotiating tactic with adobe

its just a negotiating tactic

licence your stuff to us and make a bit of money or we will kill your income stream with a new file format killing your PDF RIP & Acrobat

(intresting thing is Acrobat sales account for nearly as much as the whole "creative suite" photoshop et al )

MS are completly unable to produce a decent PDF RIP for windows !

MS want to write PDF's and have been in talks for a year now with adobe I guess it a new level in those "talks"

MS thinks that printer Manufacture's are going to incorperate this and not pay adobe for their RIP and yeah its possible that some low end might do it just witness HP and their printing comunication but HP size & time doing this plus where do they make money...

MS would have to provide these manufacturer's with the software as they are not good at this so MS will do a referance implmentation and those are always great...

welcome Microsoft to the printing world where they are Big Boys
sales are slow
they make alot of money off customer support...

regards

John 'RIP me' Jones

Re:Royalty free license

Indeed, from Microsoft, "open and available for royalty-free licensing" typically means you can get a non-sublicensable license by sending them a letter. That's how it works for their network protocols stuff. Non-sublicensable meaning that it's not GPL2-compliant.

Re:Royalty free license

Hey if its free, and all you have to do is fill out a form that has some legal crap about you agreeing to not reverse engineer, give it to your pals, etc. then that is fine. It is still free - and if someone wants it - they can also fill out the form.

The worst thing would be "It's free" for about two years - and then when the market is almost totally switched to this new format it becomes pay.

Re:Royalty free license

I am sick and tired of trying to give a poor explaination as to why a document; rtf, doc, wps, etc, will not open with the copy of the MS app they happen to be using because it was saved with the app on their previous system.

Heh. We keep a Mac in each of the PC labs, because it can open some of the weirder Works files from pc's and then save them in Office format files. So fucking weird.

.met file extension?

Hope they don't use .met.. that's already used by emule.

Or maybe that's the plan.

Re:.met file extension?

The blah.jpg.bat was a result of Microsoft assuming users didn't need to see file extensions that it knows what to do with, and hide it from the user. By hiding the file extention, the file actually looks like blah.jpg. which looks like an image to just about anyone. Hiding file extensions is my #1 pet peeve about windows.

GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN

Christ, Microsoft is like my boss - he takes on a million projects and finishes none.

Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN

Christ, Microsoft is like my boss - he takes on a million projects and finishes none.

Better than my boss; who starts one project and finishes none.

Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN

OT -
Actually, I would take the "one project boss" if I got to choose. He only fails one project. The other projects can be delegated to someone else by management.

The million project guy on the other hand obfuscates the resources really needed, which is bad for management because they then start other projects. I bet he also hands out tasks to subordinates and won't listen when they say it is impossible to do with the time allocated, so he makes employees life hell too. So he fails a million projects where some of them might have been saved.

Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN

Well, mostly it's designed to spreat FUD. The aim is to stop people from investing in Adobe. Why would you do that if Microsoft may come along in some years and do a Netscape on them. They will weaken them with insinuation etc. etc. As long as they are able to get away with transferring their monopoly in one product (the O/S) into illegal monopolies in others with no reaction from competition authorities, this will be an effective strategy against anything except for free software.

Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN

According to the Winhec keynote, Metro will be an integral part of Longhorn. Apparently, everything printable in Longhorn is a Metro document, or can be made one with ease... hey! Kind of like how everything printable in OS X is a PDF.

What a coincidence?

Check out the Winhec keynote [microsoft.com] for even more coincidences. Start about 1 hour and 3 minutes in to get to the Longhorn stuff.

Leveraging the desktop monopoly into PDF's turf

Assuming anyone still has some computing magazines from 5 or 10 years ago, it is possible to compare the hype and sales brochures for NT and 2000 to what was actually delivered. That would give a baseline on what to expect from "Shorthorn". It may also give a good base for customers who've been burned by pricing, licensing or security issues to file with the Better Business Bureau. I mean everyone who bought into Software Assurance [nwfusion.com] got a good return on investment, right?

I expect that an alpha version of "Shorthorn" will get pushed out the door in December just to justify claims that it was ready in 2006. The only way for MS to gain marketshare over PDF would be to leverage their desktop monopoly to break into that new market currently occupied by PDF.

Even if the licensing were just a rubberstamp issue (which it probably isn't) with MS giving the nod till all who request it (which it probably won't), dealing with the paperwork is an unreasonable hurdle and PDF still wins. Publishing is about reaching your audience and that's where a freely available, documented format like PDF comes in. Yes, it's owned by Adobe, but anyone can implement a writer or a reader. Metro fails on that due to licensing restrictions.

Too late?

I think they are a bit late in the game, given that most people are used to PDF and have PDF reader installed already. It's like Firefox, sure it made IE dropped below 90%, that's still a tiny splash and I don't think it will have the chance to become the majority.

Re:Too late?

"Yes, a PDF reader exists....but for the love of god, it's the most bloated, slow, nag-infested document viewers I've ever used, and it only seems to get worse with each version."

Wow, those are pretty strong things to say about Ghostview.

8^)

Re:Too late?

I got tired of Acrobat Reader and downloaded the free Foxit PDF reader instead. Tiny download, vastly better performance. Check it out. [foxitsoftware.com]

Re:Too late?

Well you know the OSX display system is based on PDF right? So Preview itself is not rendering the PDF, it is just reading the data from the file and passing it to Quartz the systems display framework.

Windows display system is currently based on GDI, so any pdf renderer on windows must read the pdf, and then calculate how to draw the equivelent image using GDI commands, a much slower process. You couldn't port Preview to Windows without also porting Quartz, and then it wouldn't really be Windows anymore.

Windows can render WMF and EMF files really fast because those formats are basically a set of GDI operations streamed to a file.

This Metro format will have the same benifits on Windows as PDF does on OSX, Metro is based on Avalon and XAML, which will be built into Windows as the presentation model.

Re:Too late?

> I think they are a bit late in the game, given that most people are used to PDF and have PDF reader installed already. It's like Firefox, sure it made IE dropped below 90%, that's still a tiny splash and I don't think it will have the chance to become the majority.

Netscape had massive market share before IE was bundled with windows. Bundling with windows can do excellent things to your market share.

Interesting, but flawed

Firstly, Microsoft was dealing with a universal format - HTML. Sure, they may have buggered it up or extended it, but BOTH Netscape and Microsoft needed to deal with that format. In this case, Microsoft is trying to introduce a new format that noone has adopted yet. I don't think it's going to fly - people have too much invested in Adobe's PDF and PS formats.

Re:Interesting, but flawed

> Firstly, Microsoft was dealing with a universal format - HTML. Sure, they may have buggered it up or extended it, but BOTH Netscape and Microsoft needed to deal with that format. In this case, Microsoft is trying to introduce a new format that noone has adopted yet. I don't think it's going to fly - people have too much invested in Adobe's PDF and PS formats.

When Metroviewer is shipped with Longhorn and XPSP3, pdf producers will see that they can switch to Metro and the majority if their audience will need no extra software whatsoever. Couple this with the 80/20 rule (about 80 percent of pdf creators use 20 percent of the feature set) then a free beer Metro export bundled with MS Office will seem very attractive to them.

So in style now...

Why has it become to stylish to be Metro now?

Doing it right...

The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML. Can we expect Microsoft to do this right?

No. Royalty-free licensing still allows them to place restrictions. And as for XML, so what? Word documents are in XML format, but the XML only encapsulates a bunch of stuff that's still proprietary and inaccesible. Lastly, the last thing anyone needs is another document format owned by a monopoly.

Re:Doing it right...

Well said.

The only reason to use a computer is to manipulate and store data. If your data is being held in someone elses proprietary, secret, format then you risk losing your own data.

Or as I like to think of it it's like putting your swag in someone elses safe where you haven't got the key. Fine as long as they "play nicely" but what happens when they suddenly decide you can't have your stuff back without paying an enormous fee ? Or that you now have to pay them large maintenance fees for them to keep storing your stuff ? Or in the worst case where they sell the safe to "a big band gang" who now insist this means they own your stuff too ?

So I think it's a very bad idea. Very bad indeed.

Insisiting on open formats and open standards also means everyone has to compete on a level playing field. This can only encourage developers/companies to focus more on the quality of the software they produce in order to stand out from the competition.

So once again all I can say to Microsoft is "thanks, but no thanks".

Re:Same strategy?

Surely that's the same strategy Adobe uses. Adobe Acrobat Professional, for example? Just guessing here...

Sure, but PDF is an open format that they allow anyone to implement independently without requiring them to pay Adobe royalties. I doubt Microsot would be so permissive.

And this is why...

Adobe fears MS?

They spend nearly $4Billion to buy Macromedia, and MS comes out with the half-crap document format??

Honestly now, someone go slap some sense into Adobe, MS will never be able to make even a dent in Adobe's market share.

Re:And this is why...

but your forgetting,
if microsoft makes a metro document editor included in ms word, which almost all businesses have, then most businesses will have no need to ever use adobe again. All they need is for metro to be almost as good and then creatively get it on every computer out there. Then everyone will be able to read and edit the document. After Adobe is dead, they can start to charge for a "full featured" document editor and leave simple edits and reading to word(or as a stand alone program). Either way, they can use this to kill adobe pretty damn easily.

It helps when your stuff comes pre-installed. YOu just need to bundle it right to kill off competition.

of course, this is all banking on their ability to come out with a format that is at least almost as good at pdf. But if they do, it will still take a few years to begin unseating Adobe because businesses are slow to change even with incentives.

Re:And this is why...

PDF will still occupy the high end. Most $1,000+ printers understand postscript and PDF natively, and even if these presses/printers are firmware upgradable, who wants another page description language? Especially if most of your graphics/pre-press people use Macs anyway and can't use Metro. Sorry, just because it's XML and doesn't have %% signs everywhere doesn't make it a worthwhile page description language.

Microsoft tried to butt in on Adobe's turf before with Truetype, but no one (or at least, no one important) does Truetype font libraries, Bitstream, Monotye et al all make their fonts type 1 postscript.

Re:And this is why...

Microsoft kill Adobe? You have to be shitting me.

Sorry, they're big, but not that big.

Adobe are greater than just PDF, for a start. There are numerous professional publications that have moved from Quark Xpress to Indesign of late, and they now own all of the following as well:

* Photoshop, the defacto standard for photo editing software.
* Fireworks (as of the last week), the only serious competition Photoshop has for web developers.
* Illustrator, arguably the industry-standard vector graphics package.
* Freehand, one of the major competitors to Illustrator.
* Dreamweaver, the only thing that has come close to a web development IDE/WYSIWYG editor of any sizable distinction or market share. First person to say "Frontpage" gets laughed at long and loud.

And they won't kill PDF, either. Every single professional printer accepts PDF. When I submit adverts to magazines for publication, they go in as PDFs. When I get proofs back, they come as PDF.

People have a lot of money invested in the PDF infrastructure. If they're doing anything serious with publishing, PDF is it. That won't change just because Microsoft give away a free reader with the OS. Many printers and designers use Apple machines or the occasional Sun machine running the hardware, at least over here. Professional printing is a fuck of a lot more complex than just pressing "print" and having the right drivers installed, and the professionals are already over the hurdles of implementing PDF importing and printing on their (extremely expensive) hardware. Why would they switch?

Microsoft haven't a chance of damaging the professional position PDF has. They should be more worried about whether Adobe will bother to implement import facilities in Indesign for their new format. Which I doubt, as Adobe has money invested in SVG and still doesn't have particularly top-notch SVG import in many of their packages. I suspect they'd have to get in the queue.

Re:And this is why...

People will still use Adobe tools to create content. But when they go to print they will be able to create Metro documents, in the same way that printing on OSX creates PDF documents.
Even if they decide not to support it directly Adobe cannot prevent people from exporting to Metro without also sabotageing their ability to print from the Windows versions of their applications.
Everything that anyone prints from any application will be turned into a metro document by the print spooler.

PDF is A-OK

There's nothing wrong with PDFs. I can create and open PDFs easily and speedily in OS X with Preview.

Acrobat Reader, however, is like an eighty year old woman behind the wheel of an otherwise useful and speedy automobile. Why does Preview take a a matter of milliseconds to do what takes Acrobat fifteen seconds or more?

Oh yeah, there's no dobut that Metro is going to be Trusted Computing Friendly.

Re:PDF is A-OK

Why does Preview take a a matter of milliseconds to do what takes Acrobat fifteen seconds or more?

Just think of all the extra things Acrobat has to do.

• Load ads from Yahoo into toolbar.
• Load and verify the "webbuy.dll" DRM system.
• Load the PDF form management system.
• Check with Adobe for updates.
• Check with Adobe for more products to try to sell you. ("There's more to Acrobat than the Reader!")
• Coming soon: Acrobat/Flash interaction. At last, animated PDFs!

Re:PDF is A-OK

Coming soon: Acrobat/Flash interaction. At last, animated PDFs!

Correct except for the "Coming soon:".

Re:Reader is a fucking trainwreck.

It's not at all obvious, but you can have a URL link to a specific page of a PDF in Acrobat Reader. Tack something like #page=42 onto the end of a URL to a PDF and Reader will open it to that page. (Of course, for what you describe you'll still have to update the URL when you finish, but it's better than nothing.)

More info here [rdpslides.com].

Re:PDF is A-OK

If you don't like acrobat, there [foxitsoftware.com] are some alternatives [visagesoft.com] for Windows that might be worth a try, not to mention stuff like GhostScript, xpdf, etc.

Yet Another Failed Long-Term Strategy

Conked (W3C-CSS), Embrace (WinMedia-DRM), Hijack (MIT-Kerberos), engulf (Active Directory), and discard (NetBEUI).

How about open, free (as in beer) for a change?

that's not "open"

An XML-based PDF-alternative is a good idea. However, a format is not "open" if it is "available for licensing". "Available for licensing" implies that the creator of the format retains some control, and that is not acceptable, no matter who the company is that created the format.

Microsoft seems to have trouble with the concept of "open"; perhaps that's not too surprising, since Sun, traditionally one of the strongest proponents of open systems and formats, has developed trouble in their understanding of "open" as well since they came out with Java.

Re:that's not "open"

Yeah, I think it would be cool if someone made an XML based display format [w3.org].

Even cooler, it should be design for use on the internet with features like hyperlinks and embedded objects. That would be cool! And we wouldn't have to worry about different implementations rendering things differently [msdn.com], since it would be an open standard that anyone could implement! We could even use those XML documents to help us mini-applications [apple.com] or even entire UI structures [mozilla.org]. That would be boss!

Someone should really make some XML standards like that.

That's Microsoft

It doesn't matter if we from the outside can see the complete nuttiness of switching a pdf-based workflow to a MS-the-root-of-all-evil-based workflow. This will succeed, just as Word has succeeded to be the de-facto document standard in every organisation and corporation out there, it's from the same guys who does the rest of the complex shit inside my harddrive. I hear management people saying 'synergetic effects' and we all know what happens when they use that language. Common sense is out the door and stupidity is governor.

Re:That's Microsoft

But consider...is this notan important step to wiping out *.doc as the "standard" document format? Granted, you're replacing it with Yet Another Microsoft File Format, but surely this one sounds like it will be far less onerous to work with.

Of course

As everyone predicted, as in every market that Microsoft has entered, they are doomed to failure right from the start.

Wait...

Adobe

And just recently, when Adobe aquired Macromedia [slashdot.org], slashdotters everywhere had to ask: why? [slashdot.org]

One of Adobe's flagship products (bonus points for naming the other), will now be directly threatened by M$, and so it must do its best and diversify.

Re:Adobe

One of Adobe's flagship products (bonus points for naming the other),

IntelliDraw? PageMaker? umm.... LiveMotion? wait, wait, it's ... TypeStyler!

Dunno. I give up. [about.com]

It is amazing....

how many Windows based companies end up being a competitor to MS. Then the same company stays and competes in MS's backyard, with their billions of dollars that they can afford to lose, and thinks that they can win! Such companies as Intuit (who has only one product that is profitable; turbo tax), Adobe (who will come under extreme pressures from MS as MS includes more of their new stuff in Windows for free), Oracle/SAP (who will soon be competing against a reved up MS with all sorts of Business software available for free).

Because--

I think Microsoft feels it's important to do this because PDF is becoming a truly universal format, and they want to jump onto the bandwagon without giving Adobe any credit in any way for it.

Now, PDF is a first-class file format in OS-X, and OpenOffice can create them fairly easily. Building PDF capability into Word must strike Microsoft as being just a little too interoperable.

The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML.

Um, the words "open" and "licensing" are not compatible. Not in my book leastways.

Can we expect Microsoft to do this right? If they do, I think it could be a good thing.

How come? What is there that Metro can do that PDF, or for that matter Word combined with Wordviewer, can't? I guess it would be nice to have OS support for a portable document format, but does Microsoft really have to invent an entirely new format to do that?

Sigh...

Seriously Microsoft, with your thousands upon thousands of talented (paid) programmers and with the deadline of Longhorn constantly being pushed back, is it at all possible for you to do something that is not

a) Reinventing the wheel
b) Taking someone else's idea and repackaging it
c) 100 steps behind what open source is already doing.
d) Inconsequencal to your only major release, Longhorn.

So what if Longhorn introduces a new document format? Within 5 minutes of running it I bet we'll all find something MS could of spent better their time on.

Yawn

I don't know if this will catch on or not, and I don't really care.

What bugs me about this is that MS is the largest software company in the world, with a huge research budget, and one of their best ideas is to come up with an alternative to existing de jure standard. Is this really the best use of R & D resources?

Come on people, there are real and interesting problems to be solved in software development and usability...use your powers for good.

wonderful...

A program that will likely run slower and crash more often than Acrobat is exactly what I needed in my life.

XML will have performance issues

It won't matter for short documents, but for large documents XML will have problems with random access.

PDF is very carefully laid out so that you can perform random access to the document and even download only those parts which you wish to read as you read them.

The offsets are a bit of a nusiance for the code that writes PDF, but aside from that it's a very clean format.

Beyond that, XML encoded documents will be larger. One would think that a gzip type encoding would thrive on the intense repetition in XML tags, but in practice they have a pretty signification impact on compressed file size. PDF is a terse encoding to begin with and supports zipping internally so it is invisible to users, plus the random access still works on the zipped content.

I'm more than willing to assess the merits of the two formats when both of them are real, but for now my money is on the format designed for efficient encoding and access to documents rather than the one designed to use the trending encoding format of the decade.

Royalty free licensing is still licensing

It is a good idea to be wary of licenses that are royalty free. Every document that has a license, free or not, allows Microsoft, or any company that owns that license to have a foothold in your life.

You don't have to pay for MetroReader version 1 or 2, but MetroReader version 3 might not be free, and they also might change the format slightly, and suddenly you're a Word '97 user in a Word 2000 world.

And then guess what? You have to wait for OpenMetro to reverse engineer the format so you can read Metro documents without MetroReader, because Microsoft decided not to freely license the format to Sun Microsystems.

PDF is here, it's open, it works well, it's already integrated into many businesses, and regardless of how much you hate Adobe Reader, the format itself is good. There's no reason to switch.

Graphic Studios?

So tell me how this is going to work in a Studio-print environment.

You've got all of these Mac operators, busily using Adobe Indesign and sending print ads out to magazines and newspapers in the required eps or hi-res PDF format (that MUST be generated by original Adobe products for QA purposes). Then along comes Metro and this somehow competes with Adobe.

How? Adobe make no money from Adobe reader and for the creation of PDF's for the non-publishing industry there have been numerous free (gratis) and/or alternative tools for years. Is Microsoft going to create a killer design tool as well? And for the Mac to boot, coz those graphic artists aint going to swap.

No. What will happen is this becomes just another Microsoft feature that no other platform/tool will be able to support and we will have yet another reader that we have to load up...

Oh dear...

Microsoft - Reinventing the wheel, one program at a time.

wordperfect vs word , netscape vs ie

build it right deep into the os and ms is settled

Microsoft PR Week

Or is this? I just start to wonder how paid Microsoft PR people are here on Slashdot with the aim to push such articles trough? Because OS X is out? Because Apple is gaining ground?

I just wonder :)

Re:Metro Feature?

PDF has DRM, you know. You can restrict user saving, printing, copying, editing, and even high-level rendering.

Already have XML based document format

There already is an XML based WYSIWYG document format that does everything PDF does and more, the W3C's open standard, SVG.

SVG already works [svgmaker.com] with all Windows programs.

Destroying our naming conventions

So not only does Microsoft push it's ways around the software industry, it also has to start affecting the very fundamentals of our society.

My guff is the name "Metro"

metro [reference.com]

n : electric underground railway

How about they create their own name for their format that doesn't have to rely on complicating the English dictionary even further.

Since when was an underground train and a bunch of documents the same thing? Windows had some sort of metaphysical relationship, you had little windows. Windows of space, windows of opportunity, windows with things in them. Apple Computers has an Apple (representative of fruit) so that you at least can relate to the word.

I could be preaching to a deaf audience, but I truly believe that linking so many things to single words just starts erroding our language basics. I truly think we could do a far better job of respecting our naming conventions in the real world and actually create naming conventions in the virtual world.

Let me use the Portable Document Format for example. It's called Portable Document Format. Good for that. That's what it is. Very long name, but it makes sense and it is not contradicting the diction rules. "PDF" is fast 3 letters to punch in on the keyboard. Sounds Peedee Eff.

Peedee Eff doesn't exist in English. It's not even English restricted. French sounds "Pay Day Eff". Sure the derivatives do come from the English title "Portable Document Format" but those derivatives ("PDF" spoken) do not intentionally override the language base.

Final line is: Don't let corporations define what your world is. Let your world define what corporations are.

DJVU is probably better & Open Source tools ex

If you want a REALLY superior document format that makes PDF look like something out of the Old Stone Age, check out DJVU. It's a seriously cool format that practically nobody knows about.

What it is/does

Info from DJVUZONE [djvuzone.org]:

DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") is a new image compression technology developed since 1996 at AT&T Labs to solve precisely that problem. DjVu allows the distribution on the Internet of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu allows content developers to scan high-resolution color pages of books, magazines, catalogs, manuals, newspapers, historical or ancient documents, and make them available on the Web. . . . and white documents. Scanned pages at 300 DPI in full color can be compressed down to 30 to 100KB files from 25MB.. Black-and-white pages at 300 DPI typically occupy 5 to 30KB when compressed. This puts the size of high-quality scanned pages within the realm of an average HTML page (which is typically around 50KB).

How to get it

Viewers are available for Win/Mac/Linux.

The Linux package DJVUlibre [djvuzone.org] allows both viewing and DJVU document creation and is Open Source. It is available for most major Linux distros, source, Solaris, cygwin and may be available for automated installation by whatever method your distro uses.

LizardTech (ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION) provides the free downloadable Mac/Win viewers, and sells Win/Mac DJVU creation tools. (either above URL)

However, there are also free document conversion [djvuzone.org] sites [djvuzone.org], upload various file formats (e.g. PDF, images) and get back .DJVUs.

Check it out.

it is NOT just a fancy multipage bitmap format

DJVU is more like PDF should have been..

easiest to quote, I rearranged the text order a bit to highlight the most obvious and important difference.

From What's Inside DJVU [djvuzone.org]

In short, DjVu is a multipage document format that can use a number of different coder/decoders (codecs) to compress the individual chunks that compose an images or a page. In fact, DjVu is really four compression techniques wrapped into one format:

BZZ: A general-purpose data compression technique similar to bzip2. Bzz is used to compress searchable text layers and other metadata in DjVu documents.

and that's what makes it more than just another compressed bitmap format like .JPG)

DjVuPhoto (aka IW44): A progressive, wavelet-based lossy compression format for continuous-tone images (i.e. photos and pictures).

DjVuBitonal (aka JB2): A lossless or lossy compression technique for bitonal (black & white) or palettized images that is particularly effective on images with repeated shapes (such as documents images where the same character appears many times in the document).

DjVuDocument: A technique for scanned color document that separates images into a foreground layer that contains the text and line drawings, and a background layer that contains the pictures and background textures. The foreground is encoded with DjVuBitonal and the Background with DjVuPhoto.

and that can really make for small files with big impact. I once downloaded a map document that was a meg or two with DJVU, that decompressed to 100+ megs when I decompressed it into a bitmap. (I think it was the early 1900s map of Yellowstone on the djvuzone site somewhere) The text was sharp and clear in either document... as you know, legible text does not survive high image compression levels well in ordinary bit maps.

Re:DJVU is probably better & Open Source tools

I have to chime in on this. I've been using it for probably about a year now. It works great.

About 2 years ago, I decided I had too much paper, and that I couldn't find any important papers amoung the bunch. Being a packrat, I decided scanning was the way to go.

I bought a used Fujitsu M3097g+ off ebay for about $100 with document feeder and got started.

I can generate .tiff pictures (about 1.3M per letter size) which is too big. Using tiff2pdf and other tools I can get that down to about 50-120K per letter size page (using g4 compression).

Using djview I can get it down to around 13-25K. Thats right, like 25-40% the size of a similar PDF (or less). Plus djvu has technology to cleanup fly-specs and noise on pictures to improve compression.

djvu does color, or black and white and conversion is pretty fast. Plus, djvu documents are just a concatenation of complete single files: you can open up, unpack and add, remove or rearrange all the pages in the file. So, I can continuously append pages a larger djvu file over months as I scan them. That is difficult to do with PDF.

And its open source. The free tools will remain free, and there are enough tools available for reading, creating and manipulating files.

Sleeping with the Devil

A few years ago, when Adobe canned Premier for the Mac on OSX because Adobe was all in a huff about Apple competing with them with Final Cut Pro, was the time when Adobe started developing primarily for Windows. Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 were superb on my WinXP laptop at work, but they sucked big, hairy, sweaty, donkey balls on OSX, being slow, not fitting in with the OS HI guides very well and above all, being drastically late to the platform.

At the time (Mac OSX 10.1) one could have had the distinct impression that Adobe had given up on the Mac platform and was only developing for those die hards in the pre-press and printing industry. And since then, Adobe has brought out new tools, such as that Audio app (ex Cool Edit Pro) which are Windows only. Even Acrobat, that bloated piece of pig fat, ran better on Windows.

Then, it seemed as if Adobe realised that OSX was surprisingly (to them and their utterly clueless marketing staff) making big gains rapidly, and lo and behold, The CS set is much better in its OSX integration.

But what makes me really laugh is that Adobe is suddenly being faced with a major competitor to one of its main cash cows (PDF is used in governments and official papers worldwide), and this by no less than Microsoft which has both the resources and the time to slowly bring printer makers to write drivers for it and to let it slowly gain acceptance. Microsoft is about the only company that can afford to let this Metro thing flop through three versions until it gains traction.

I bet you the people in Mountain View (Adobe), are crapping themselves. This could be one of the reasons they bought Macromedia, in order to have Flash as a barganing chip with MS.

Another battle won

So, finally Microsoft have admitted defeat in the Word Vs PDF battle. After years of simply refusing to support PDF in their products they have decided that the world simply doesn't care what they think - PDF is the document interchange format, at least for finished documents.

MS never supported PDF because they wanted to lock everyone into using Word and its format(s) as the way to pass documents around. Never mind that it was a load of crap for such purposes, quality has never figured in MS's designs and probably never will.

So, now that MS has admitted that the world not only wants, but is using someone else's format (a nice, open format) are they going to get with the mainstream and give their customers what they clearly want? Fuck no. Microsoft didn't get where it is today by listening to customers: customers are there to milk via lock-in. Does the farmer ask the cows when they'd like slaughtered?

Instead they've decided, as usual, to tell the customers what they want: a new, propriety document format to solve all the problems they're currently solving with PDF.

In other words, just like Sparkle, Microsoft's response to the market is to pick another battle it can't win. To win, it would have to be addressing some lack in the current offering that has the potential to create a new market they can exploit, but the only lack is one MS sees: revenue from making portable documents. The rest of the world is already making them and has little interest in the "problem". So, basically, the market for Microsoft's new format is...Microsoft itself. So, who cares?

It's good to see Bill lose one occasionally.

TWW

TrueType vs. Postscript fonts

Remember...no, of course 1/2 of you didn't; you were 5!

OK...for you kiddies out there; Way back in the 90s, Adobe charged an arm and a leg for Postscript ($1,000/printer) and Postscript fonts were expensive. Apple complained. Microsoft complained. Everyone buying a printer complained or wished for a cheap Postscript printer so !!#@$!$ would look right when they printed. Adobe held firm.

Apple decided along with Microsoft to change part of the problem...Postscript fonts. Jointly, they developed TrueType. Adobe held firm...till it was obvious that Postscript was in danger. Rates fell on Poscript licences, though it was too late and TrueType fonts became dominate.

Adobe retrenched and created the Postscript offshoot PDF...and documents became printable and portable again. Adobe became more involved in the detailed document creation process.

Fast forward to now. Microsoft (by themselves) are attempting to complete the job and take Adobe out of the document creation picture. It's not going to be hard for Microsoft to do it this time. Expect a suite of Metro document editing and processing tools from Microsoft around the time Longhorn is released.

The only gift in this? You now have a year and a half to two years to plan.

Re:TrueType vs. Postscript fonts

It's not going to be hard for Microsoft to do it this time.

How do you figure? This time Microsoft isn't competing against an overpriced product and overpriced fonts, and there's no groundswell of anger against PDF.

If anything, the document format that people are hating right now is Microsoft's own Word format.

Proprietary Features

It doesn't matter how open the format is. Once Microsoft starts adding thing like digital watermarks and signing other readers wont be able to read the files. At least Adobe actually ports their code to Linux. We can't expect this from Microsoft.

PDF is *not* fine

The fact is, PDF does serve a purpose but it is not an ideal format by any stretch.

For those of us doing real work, many sites are now offering PDF "forms" that allow us to complete an online version of a traditionally printed form. Since the form must look exactly as intended, PDF is ideal for this. Unfortunately, it doesn't always function as designed. Some sites don't support Acrobat 7.0 while others require it, and depending on the HTTP content-type then newer versions of Acrobat will simply reject dynamically generated PDF's (they don't end in .PDF and they don't match an application/x-pdf MIME type).

To make matters even more frustrating, the ever-elusive PDF plugin is required. This means if you happen to not be at your computer, the first thing you need to do is install Acrobat Reader. I can assure you that when using a client's PC this is not always possible.

For this particular application, I think there is plenty of room for a new format. If Metro can support the same layout capabilities of PDF, and provide simplified XML representations that can run in a standard browser (Firefox, IE, etc.) without a plugin... Then MS might just be on to something.

Yet another difficulty is the automagical reformatting Acrobat does when you try printing a PDF. If will invariably auto-rotate and shrink-to-fit your document to the page, which is awkward when you are trying to produce something with very tight margins. While Acrobat 7 has addressed this issue, upgrades are not possible for everyone and sometimes you end up cropping pages.

Again... plenty of room for improvement here, especially for pre-press stuff that may need to get tweaked by a printer before a run.

Microsoft Reader Part 2?

Microsoft already has a PDF-like document format and a reader called "Microsoft Reader". It's targeted for PDAs, competing head to head with the mobile version of Acrobat Reader. It's based on an XML document format.

It's the least pleasant eBook reader I have ever used, bar none.

This bodes. This is just so chock full of boding it scares me.

PDF more than files stored on the web

Because the PDF format is so open, the entire print industry uses it. Most of the stuff you read in dead tree form was once a PDF. There are several ISO standards for print-ready PDF files, such as PDF/X1a:2003.

Many printers ( not the thing on your desk, the companies that print stuff ) have automated workflows built on PDF. You shovel single-page PDFs in one end, and software that understands that open PDF format looks into each file, determines its page number, places that single-page PDF on a digital "sheet" with other single pages ( called an imposition ), and sends it to a machine that makes printing plates. That platemaker understands the open PDF format and is able to image that "sheet" directly to a plate that is mounted on the press. Automated, without costly human hand-holding made possible because many pieces of software from many companies that are not named Adobe can program to an open standard.

PDF files can also contain JDF data. JDF is XML-based, and it can communicate ( or will communicate ) with many types of printing plant machinery. For example, many printers have robotic paper loading systems, so that imaginary job above that is PDF can tell the paper robot to load the specific paper for that job so that when the plates are loaded on the press, the press can begin printing. The JDF data within that PDF can also tell the paper cutter how to cut the sheets, and/or tell a folder how to fold the sheets.

All this because of how open the PDF format is. And Metro is going to replace all this, particularly with the momentum PDF already has? I think Metro is just a fancy WMF. Microsoft really needs to copy Apple on this and use PDF instead. Talk about NIH.

Why not? Follows the same path they were on.

This was actually pretty easy to see coming (though personally I did not see it).

This just continues farther down the path they already started with .Net. In that case they took a whole bunch of Java libraries and the VM, capitalized all the method names and came up with slightly improved VM technology. Instead of working to improve Java VM's they went thier own way and so now we have a huge duplication of effort across the industry as people waste time writing code for both platforms or porting already solid systems from one to the other, and back again.

So then why is it at all surprising to see Microsoft instead of embracing yet another industry standard go their own direction, industry duplication be dammned?

The future from this point is pretty easy to see with a great divide of people supporting PDF and people supporting Metro, and a lot of work for document makers and readers in-between.

The fundamental question: does Microsoft have enough momentum to really push Metro everywhere. I think it will be hard as PDF is far more entrenched in many places than Java is/was... then again PDF's in the life of the average consumer have only just started to take off, and they will come at it from that direction (just as they always have).

AMAZING!

Who would ever think of such a thing! I can't wait until end of next year for Longhorn, where I can enjoy this wonderful new feature!

Oh... http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/printing/ [apple.com] you mean anything can print to a PDF? Natively? With a built in accelerated viewer? IT'S BEEN OUT ALREADY HOW LONG!?! Uh... nevermind then.

No one has a clue

after reading a good 90% of the posts in this topic, it is apparent that 90% or more of /. has simply NO CLUE what happens in the desktop publishing world and how this will affect the printing industry

A couple people got it right though, the printing industry (not your pos laserjet or kinko's or even you companys fancy $5000 xerox color laser printer) will not give up the billions of dollars invested in creating the "perfect" PDF workflow. While the Formats used (PDF, Postscript, JDF, CiP3|4 and PPF) are all Free to use, the software used to create them isnt.

Not only that, to make the a printed product, you need to make lithographic plates, either from film or directly from PDF (CTP). the imagesetters are run by software from Creo (Prinergy or Brisque) or Rampage rips. HUGE money has gone into the purchasing of this equipment (one imagesetter and a single Prinergy server can set you back well over 100k a YEAR + support fee).

If microsoft wants into this HUGE industry, they need to offer more than just a new file format.

Adobe offers the most complete page creation suit that there is. While many many people use Quark to actually make the page layout placement, everyone used Illustrator to make the postscript files (export page from Quark, import into Illustrator, print to EPS in illustrator, becuase postscript in quark 4 and 5 is broken).

This is a waste of time because it'll get lost in teh sea of slashdot stories...

Re:Good, now we can get rid of Acrobat Reader!

http://www.acropdf.com/ [acropdf.com]

Look for PDF Speed Up. Removes the nags, sets all the plugins to optional, turns off the splash screen, kills the ads in the corner, ect.

Acrobat Reader 6.x opens very quick now, and I have yet to have it crash. (By quick I mean in under 3 seconds on my 900mhz, 512mb pc100 sdram win2k machine)

Re:they haven't done anything else right

Exactly. My one and only problem with Microsoft is that they suck at everything they do. Other than that, it is a pretty cool company.

Re:they haven't done anything else right

Reminds me of a quote:

"The one time Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, it'll probably be a vaccuum cleaner"

Re:they haven't done anything else right

You know, sucky products I could deal with. It's their business practices I can't stand.

If they weren't so underhanded and evil we wouldn't have to deal with their sucky products, because market forces would have either killed them or forced them to not suck.

Re:No problems there

As an end user, I look forward to any replacement to PDFs.

No, you look forward to a replacement for Adobe's PDF Reader. PDF the format is wonderful -- just look at it's support on Mac OS X.

The reason government agencies (and many many others) use it is because it's the best, most open, best-supported format of it's kind. There is absolutely no requirement that you use Adobe's software to read or write PDF.

Re:No problems there

try not using the fucking bloated reader you moron. BTW.. some people like having documents in a none editable, "what you see on one platform is what you see on all platforms" document.

Re:they haven't done anything else right

The splash screen to Win2K is a bitmap obviously blown up by 200% or so.

Slow down, turbo.

The splash screen is displayed before the video driver is loaded, hense the lack of color depth and resolution.

If you're gunna flame, check your facts first.