Acrobat-killer Submitted to Standards Body

Flying Wallenda writes "Did Adobe make a tactical blunder when it complained to the European Union about Microsoft including support for its XML Paper Specification (XPS) in Windows Vista and Office 2007? Now that Microsoft has decided to submit its 'PDF killer' to a standards-setting organization, Adobe may be regretting its decision. 'Microsoft is looking again at its license in order to make it compatible with open source licenses, which means that the "covenant not to sue" will likely be extended to cover any intellectual property dispute stemming from the simple use or incorporation of XPS. The end result is that using XPS may be considerably more attractive for developers now that the EU has apparently expressed concerns over the license.'"

Word Dilution

Pretty soon the word 'killer' will have lost its original meaning. In fact, it will be a compliment to be called a 'killer' because it means you were a solution for a problem that already had a widely popular solution.

Yet you overcame that and somehow became the new solution until you yourself were killed. And your functionality was conveyed specifically by saying '<competing solution> killer.' They couldn't even take the time to mention what it was you did.

Slashdot uses this way too much [google.com].


Killer [slashdot.org].

Re:Word Dilution

Fresh from Hans Reiser's hard drive, yo!

Re:Word Dilution

Liberal, for instance

Only in America. Out here in the civilised Rest Of The World, it still means "free from prejudice or bigotry; open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc."

It took me a while, and many raised eyebrows, before I realised that some Americans use the word as an INSULT.

Re:Word Dilution

I'm not a murderer, your honor. I simply removed the occupant of that home so a newer, more functional citizen can occupy that dwelling.

The Killers

I find it telling that so much of what big companies like Microsoft try to create is intended to be some kind of Killer. Rather than come up with something brand new that the market has never seen before, they wait for someone else to do just that, and then they try to Kill it and claim its glory for themselves.

Adobe is screwed

XPS support is being built into new models from all major printer manufacturers. It is lot more modern than PDF/PS and does a better job supporting fancier documents with features like transparencies and gradients. And now apparently its going to be open and standardized as well. It looks like MS nailed this one.

Re: Adobe is screwed? Ha.

Does XPS do all that? Does XPS do CMYK? Can XPS generate the equivalent of PDF/X-1a, an ISO standard for advertising specs required by Time Inc. and other big media sites?


Ok, by now everyone reading this has surely looked up XPS and can see that it has not only several features that PDF technology doesn't, but it leapfrogs the PDF/Postscript technology in many areas, even including not static publishing concepts that will be a part of the upcoming generation with Electronic Inks.

XPS also is going to hurt Adobe hard in the printer and publishing industry. There are already a number of consumer printers with XPS technology coming to the market and there are also many digital presses that will offer XPS instead of PDF, because it is free to do so instead of paying the Adobe tax.

So for large publishers there is already a bit of a buzz about it, as it may reduce the digital press costs without the Adobe licensing and they are also looking at some of the new features of XPS that will speed up production and produce better quality output easier. (Less need for rasterization and conversion from the original artwork, better font support, etc.)

One of the biggest problems in the digital prining industry now is making sure the content they are producing 'outputs' properly in PDF/Poscript. And this is a BIG issue.

For example I can create Brochure now in AI or CorelDraw that will output with clipping problems when it goes to PDF format because PDF just doesn't handle all the features that full scale vector/layer illustration software offers.

Now when trying to get this to a digital PDF/Postscript based press, this is a MAJOR issue, and the artwork has to be complexity reduced, have the clipping fixed, and often most of the Brochure ends up being rasterized at the press's resolution because the Vector and Font support in a PDF fails miserably.

These types of problems have been big issues in the publising/printing community for a long time, and Postscript v3/PDF was supposed to help, but instead things have often gotten worse. So why even have PDF based press when we (as publishers) end up rasterizing the entire brochure and artwork and are basically sending a PDF Bitmap to the device so it prints as designed?

Here is where XPS steps in and takes control of the ball, it has the preservation because of the extra features in the specification, so there is less fighting with fonts and less rasterization.

There is also the factor that no special software is needed, as Vista does all the XPS work inherently, which opens the door up for more flexibility in design software used as well. (Yes OSX does Postscript/PDF, and even WindowsXP does Postscript printer output, but there is a world of difference in the way Vista handles the from screen to document to output device because of the XAML and XPS technologies.)

XPS is being seen as a welcome fix to many Adobe PDF/Postscript issues in the printing industry.

To fully understand how XPS/XAML technologies work and also to see what they offer than PDF doesn't, you just need to go read the XPS specifications, also do a search on the printer and press manufacturers that are planning on XPS devices and why they see XPS has a good technology.

Standards

> XPS support is being built into new models from all major printer manufacturers.

If so it would be a major reason to support XPS. If it is just some crap in the Windows drivers forget it. Just checked HP's site and didn't see it mentioned.

The reason it would be great to get it in printers is that it would force it to be a STANDARD, unlike PDF. MP3 is a standard in that any conforming stream will play on any conforming player. New encoders can be developed but the resulting streams must be playable on ANY player adhering to the original MP3 spec. Adobe never figured that out with PDF, requiring a continual upgrade treadmill to newer readers and adding new features in non backwards compatible ways. Even though some printers DO support a version of PDF, it isn't usable for long after purchase.

If it doesn't get embedded into printers I'd trust Microsoft even less to publish a spec and then stick with it.;

Citation Please

XPS support is being built into new models from all major printer manufacturers.

Really?

Name them.

Seriously, I've been looking. I can't find a reference from any printer maker regarding a model with XPS driver support built in.

You'd think someone other then Microsoft would be at least mentioning this, unless it were just MS blowing hot air, which we know Waggener Edstrom [waggeneredstrom.com] (MS's PR agency) would never do...

Not a thing correct

Please, in the future, before posting an explanation kindly know what in the hell you're babbling on about.

PostScript [wikipedia.org] and PCL [slashdot.org] are most certainly used for nearly the same purposes: A Page Description Language, aka PDL [wikipedia.org]. Indeed PCL was explicitly created by HP as a simpler, faster and unlicensed alternative to PostScript.

Postscript & PDF are related in that PDF is based on Postscript [adobe.com] (a well written brief history [prepressure.com] of PDF). PDF simply builds upon PS to include meta information, JavaScript, hyperlinking (internally & externally), forms & tag structures, extended colorspaces, etc. And yes, many Postscript level 3 printers can directly print PDF. (That you're unfamiliar with this feature is likely due to your apparent near complete ignorance of high end or prepress printing.)

Oh, and most self-respecting printers don't support PCL, just those from HP or licensing PCL or it's clones (yes, the PostScript workalike has its own clone market!) Further confusing things HP now uses a PostScript clone called Phoenix in their laser printers so they can offer ps support without paying Adobe licensing fees.

Of course, PostScript & PDF are now publicly [adobe.com] documented [adobe.com] and it is possible to recreate them, with Ghostscript [wikipedia.org] being the best known example (Phoenix is probably the most widely distributed)

Lastly, XPS is just a document format as is ODF, PDF,, NO. Nothing about that is right, indeed it pretty much completes every statement in your posting being flat out wrong or wildly inaccurate.

Go away and don't post again until you have something at least marginally correct or interesting to "News for Nerds". You're drooling in public and it is ugly, annoying, and counter-productive.

I love adobe

Forcing a reboot to update a file viewer is pure quality and genius.

I hope they die real soon.

I had to think for a few about this title

A dead human acrobat submitted his body?
Someone killed a human acrobat and submitted his body?
The murderer was submitted to some kind of law-enforcement?

That is late at night here, however.

Why does Microsoft keep trying to hire The Killers

I'm amazed that Brandon Flowers doesn't have Bill Gates on some sort of block-list by now.

About 6 years ago...

This is what mainstream open-source was clamoring for Microsoft to do... Now Microsoft is standardizing a wide variety of code and documents. So good. Ten years from now when a terabyte database seems kind of small but the information in it is marked up in the as standard a form as ASCII is today then processing huge amounts of information will be as easy as it gets. Once information is standardized then it opens the doors to a wide variety of companies to manipulate the information - in effect providing a "service" to the owner of the database. Open-source, closed, doesn't matter when you have standardized tubes connecting modules and information. A network-centric service economy is probably where we'll go but as Niels Bohr said "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

Hmmm...

This writeup is (once you get through the -killer nonsense) suspiciously pro-Microsoft. Shouldn't it be something like "Micro$oft Tries To Patent Paper!"?

Details?

I always wonder what it really means when Microsoft makes "open standards" and such, ever since the MSO XML debacle. I'll wait to hear some details that confirm that there aren't any dirty tricks involved.

Even so, I'm not sure why I would want to jump on this new standard at the moment. PDF is widely supported, and does a good job for the things it's meant for. Will Microsoft make a program to do the things that Acrobat does? Will it provide different ways to optimize quality/size? Will it work with the companies in the print business to make sure it provides everything they need, and works on their equipment on the same level as PDF? Because as much as PDF is nice for trading print documents online, it's real strength is the support from professional printing industries.

So that's what Microsoft needs to do to be on equal footing with Adobe, which still doesn't tell us why anyone should switch.

In all fairness...

XPS looks to me like a marginally superior format to PDF. It's XML-based, which means easier parsing as well as readability with a regular text editor, and it strips out PDF's stupid nonsense like forms and multimedia which is best left to web pages.

That being said, I'm not sure it's worth splitting the market with a similar competing format just for these advantages.

Re:In all fairness...

On the contrary, sliced bread makes an excellent stack-oriented language. One just needs to be careful to butter each slice on the correct side.

anything is better

Will this one start faster and not bug me every other time I run it to install some random new adobe crap I dont want or need? I the answer to either is yes concider me ready to convert.

Can We Please....

stop with the -killer suffix?

I haven't seen a Ford-Mustang-killer, or a Conair-hairdryer-killer, or an Pepsi-Cola-killer, or an Boeing-Airbus-500-killer before. Why is the information industry the only industry with goddamn KILLER APPLICATIONS or <FOOBAR>-KILLERS? No fucking wonder citizens and customers think software and hardware manufacturer are even less funny than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. </rant>

ECMA is warming up their rubber stamp

Hey, it worked great for .NET.

PDF is too complicated

It's unreasonably hard to generate quality PDF programmatically.
Either you have resort to using the virtual printer driver supplied with Acrobat, or you have to typeset your document to PostScript format using TeX or whatever.
And if you use the virtual printer driver, forget about interactive features and full-text searching.
Editing PDFs is a nightmare - PostScript allows way too much flexibility for a 'portable' format.

I don't know much about XPS, but organizing the document as a set of zipped XML files seems to be a step in the right direction.

Re:PDF is too complicated

using TeX or whatever

And that's bad because...?

You want a programmatic way to generate PDF,
yet you eschew pdfTeX [tug.org], which is a
compiled language that produces PDF as native output,
and is a descendent of TeX, a language invented by
Knuth, a programmatic fellow if there ever was one.

Dick Grayson

Someone better tell Dick Grayson (Batman's former Robin) about this acrobat killer. It may be the one that killed his parents.

Yes if Microsoft does this right

Microsoft could finally prove they are not assholes. Release it with complete specs and sample output, don't require Windows libraries, allo anybody to read and write it with any software using any license, and PDF will be dead in a few months.

It does sound better: it is output-only (which is really all we care about in PDF), it uses XML, and it supports alpha compositing like SVG does. Unfortunatly doing anything correctly means Microsoft has to admit that Open Source is not an evil cancer. Don't know if they can bear to do this, or if they are even capable of doing it.

title made me laugh

All I could picture was... "The Hardly Boys, two young whippersnappers with a knack for solving crimes." "Tonight's episode...'The Case of the Acrobat-Killer' "

How long until its usable

I first heard about PDF in 1995, but it wasn't until around 2000 that software existed to actually do stuff with it.

I still don't do anything in PDF that can't be done in postscript - in fact I still just produce the postscript and only convert to PDF because not many people have heard of postscript.

FoxIt reader is a good interim solution

FoxIt Reader is a great interim solution until this gets standardized. It reads PDF files and opens much faster than Acrobat. I'm not sure why Acrobat reader is so slow, but even the fastest available hardware seems to choke on it.

SVG?

I see a lot of posts in this discussion that say XPS is better than PDF, because it's XML and human readable and you can manipulate it with XSLT, it's going to be submitted as a standard, etc. That just makes me think: what about SVG? It's already a standard, it's XML, human readable, XSLT, etc.

Acrobat-killer Submitted to Standards Body

for filing a false report.

What's wrong with Acrobat?

I know it is fashionable among the Slashdot crowd to discount Acrobat as bloatware. Working as a healthcare professional, however, I really appreciate many of the features geeks may discount as bloat:

Virtually all medical papers are available as PDFs. After downloading these, I can annotate them in Acrobat with comments; Acrobat allows me to highlight important passages. I know geeks do not like DRM, but Acrobat's DRM is why some biomedical e-books are available. Thanks to Acrobat, I carry a little library on my 12" Powerbook complete with my own comments/annotations.

While it is true that Acrobat lacks a command-line interface and crashes occasionally :) it has revolutionized the way I archive things. I do not keep copies of print journals anymore. Acrobat runs all the time on my machine.

DjVu! Shame on OSS

DjVu has been THE "PDF killer" for many years and has become increasingly open over the last few. Why none of the major OSS players have ever put their weight behind this technology is beyond comprehension. It is better then PDF in every way (and JPG to boot)!

I fear this says something about OSS --why in the long run it will be maginalized by monolopy's like Microsoft.

Filesize...

And yet, they fail to fix the main problem with PDF: Filesize, as ive seen with my own tests for the same documents from Office 2007 Beta.

PLEASE let Acrobat die

I have noting against the PDF standard - but when I view PDF files on my Mac, I set up Preview as the default application because, frankly, Preview can open a PDF file an order of magnitude faster. As a simple file-viewer, Acrobat makes PDF's the 2nd to last choice for convenience (with MS Word being the last choice, of course).

Microsoft Isn't THAT Powerful

I don't get you people. For a group that proclaims their hate for Microsoft as often as they do, slashdotters swear that Microsoft can kill any application and any company. I'm sorry, but even Microsoft has their limitations.

Microsoft is no match for Adobe Acrobat. I guess you can consider Adobe the iPod equivalent of computer software companies. The measuring stick that all image editors are judged buy isn't Microsoft Paint - it's Adobe Photoshop. As far as document formants are concerned, Acrobat is no different. Adobe Acrobat is the one format that anyone even remotely computer literate is familiar with. My sister who has an office job knows what it is. My 15 year old cousin in high school knows what it is. My 51 year old mother even knows what it is. My barely computer literate brother is even familiar with Adobe Acrobat. Like the iPod, Acrobat is bigger than just a file format - it's the name that we all know and love, and it's one of a few cross platform applications that actually make quality, up-to-date Linux versions. Ask any long time Mac user, and they'll quickly tell you that Adobe was vital to keeping their platform afloat (Photoshop, Go Live).

As a matter of fact, we've seen this all before. Apple released a transportation method that was clearly better than it's competitor (USB), and submitted it to a standards committee. But despite all the advantages of Firewire, people had too many legacy applications and were too familiar with USB to abandon one of the few computer elements they were comfortable with. If you add legacy support to my previous reasons, The Microsoft threat isn't as strong as you would like to tell yourself it is.

Why?

This sound like BluRay and HD-DVD, in the sense that the improvements are marginal and you have to wonder whether it is really necessary. PDF has published spec, so its not as if its undocumented. Why does Microsoft always need to spend their time one uping the competition instead of providing something really useful? The only reason I can image is that Adobe is wanting to charge MS licensing fees, that they would rather not pay.

This really hurts to say but...

Microsoft finally did something right. Unlike how some wish to believe, Microsft does set desktop standards because most computers mainly use Microsoft software. That was really hard to say too, but it's the truth. XPS will eventually knock out PDF because most people use MS Word to type with and Microsoft could easily push XPS from there and make it the standard. It will work better than pushing postscript will because it's from Microsoft. Also, it's open-source and XML based so it will probably be adapted even by us hackers as a standard because the licensing is not evil, even though it came from Microsoft. Summary: Microsoft finally did something right.

'Covenant not to sue'

What's interesting is that XPS will be more open for use than PDF once it's approved as an international standard, because MS also has a "Covenant not to sue", something that Adobe doesn't have for PDF. Adobe reserves the right to sue users of PDF, and threatened to do just that against MS's use of PDF in Office 2007.

XPS is better than PDF (has all of PDF's functionality and adds support for some graphical effects that PDF lacks), and is easier to deal with since it's XML. It also produces smaller files. (Note that these advantages aren't because MS is "smarter" than Adobe, it's just that XPS is newer, so it does more things with newer techniques). So, if XPS becomes a standard, and has technical advantages, and has a real "covenant not to sue", why would anyone use PDF besides the inertia of the format itself?

MS was going to strip Office 2007 of XPS support, requiring a separate free downloadable plugin for such support, and they were going to do the same for PDF (both were in response to Adobe's threats). MS was also going to strip Vista of full XPS support, leaving in only that required by the core printer spool, and allowing the OEMs to bundle the full XPS support on their own accord (again, this was in response to Adobe's threats).
See:
http://blogs.msdn.com/andy_simonds/archive/2006/06 /02/XPSAdobe.aspx [msdn.com]

But now that XPS will be a recognized standard, MS should feel free to include XPS in both Officw 2007 and Vista, and Adobe can't really do anything about it.

killer...watch out!

So why is it every single time Microsoft presents something it's going to "kill" the thing it's emulating?

is MS is just a corporate emulation of a malignant tumor? it seemingly will not ever cohabitate, or cooperate, it will only attempt to kill

how pathetic is that?

look out adobe, ms is gonna kill you yet again. yawwwnnnnnnn

What is the point?

What exactly does XPS offer that PDF doesn't?
Is this just a case of microsoft not wanting to use something they have no control over?
PDF is not ideal, because it is still controlled by a single company, and they get to dictate future versions of the format... But XPS appears to be exactly the same, what we really need is an openly maintained format where multiple interested parties can decide on the features present in future versions.

Re:Times are a changin'

Assuming this standard is truly open... and compatible with the GPL (like... you don't have to sign agreements with Microsoft to implement it... which is their usual trick)... and has no submarine issues... then why would I care that it's from Microsoft.

Re:Times are a changin'

PDF already is compatible in the ways you state, is stable, and exists in many ISO approved forms. ISO 15930-2 ISO 15930-6:2003(E) i.e. PDF/X driven by prepress industry, PDF/A ISO standard requested by the US government.

We already have a standard, open, format for this sort of presentation. We don't need another. We REALLY don't need another from a company that is known to "embrace and extinguish" competing implementations of standards.

Re:Times are a changin'

I got this quote from an AC and I think it applies here:

XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more.

Re:Times are a changin'

PDF is not truly a license free product, open yes, license free - sort of...

This is how Adobe strongarmed MS in removing it from the shipping version of Office, as Adobe was going to demand licensing fees. (However it can be distributed separately without incurring the fees.)

Adobe truly screwed themselves here, they would have been the all time standard with MS giving them full support in Office, but instead they wanted to keep MS at bay and make money off the Office name. Adobe messed up.

From my inside MS sources, the XPS was never meant to become a PDF replacement, even though it has the technology to do so, and even offers more features than the PDF specification. However the move by Adobe to try to screw with MS with the Office Plug-in and taking it even further by raising contention with the whole Vista Composer that is an XAML/XPS technology came as a complete slap to MS.

Prior to Adobe trying to squeeze MS for money and try to stop Vista because of the inherent XPS/XAML composer, MS decided they didn't have to play nice in this market, and I honestly don't blame them.

MS worked with Adobe up until just a few month ago when all of this started coming down. MS even was helping Adobe with using the Vista composer technologies for Adobe products, including their PDF reader. As in MS mind they had no intention of pushing XPS outside of the Vista world which could hurt Adobe, now however with Adobe's actions, they don't feel any obligation to stay out of Adobe's playground and can pursuing opening and dropping XPS technology to all OS platforms.

Re:If only pdf would really die.

I wouldn't say that. The original Adobe reader is horrible in my opinion. But the PDF standard is quite solid and implements a lot of useful features, I think.

Especially the possibilities for inline fonts and ocr'd text using the original font are great.

Re:Times are a changin'

The OSS community, and the proprietary community have had better interoperability with Ms products than Adobe products. While I'm certainly no fan of MS things, I'm sort of glad, in a way.

Re:If only pdf would really die.

What's so horrible about PDF exactly? It's good enough to be used in the OS X graphics system of all places.

Acrobat is horrible, but that has no more to do with PDF than Internet Explorer has to do with HTML.

Re:If only pdf would really die.

PDF is not a de facto standard. As I mentioned in another post, there are ISO standards for PDF. The spec is fully open, you could go download it now, no agreeing to anything required (though it is something like 1100 pages, better get some coffee).

Re:There MS goes again...

Are you implying XML and everything based on it (SVG, AJAX, ODF...) is a bad thing?