MS Four Points of Interoperability and Adobe

Andy Updegrove writes "Recently, spokespersons for Microsoft's standards group have been promoting 'design, collaboration and licensing' as alternatives, rather than supplements to, open standards. There's an important difference between an open standard and any of these ad hoc arrangements among companies, however, and that is the fact that with a standard, everybody knows that they can get what everybody else can get, and on substantially the same terms. With a de facto standard, that's not the case - as Microsoft itself found out last week when Adobe refused to offer the same deal on saving files in PDF form that Apple and OpenOffice enjoy."

What is the status of PDF then?

[BandwidthHog]

I was under the impression that the PDF file format was an open standard and that Adobe Acrobat was proprietary software that could create and manipulate PDF files. In other words, if you would like for your software to work with PDF files you can either license code from them (some form of Acrobat) or roll your own.

I guess I was misunderinformed?

Re:save as file using ps printer, ps2pdf

[Planesdragon]

MS Office 2007 can do PDFs better than either the postscript route or OOo (sans any custom macros.) Not just a conversion of a postscript file, but a tagged and bookmarked PDF.

I suspect that this is the part that Adobe is balking at -- that anyone would care and duplicate the beyond-standard work that they do with PDFmaker, to the point where someone with MS office really doesn't need to contact them anymore.

Re:Who's this going to hurt?

[Ironsides]

I'd bet that the resulting PDFs from MS's implementation would probably be a bit more efficient than some of the "print to PDF" programs available for free.

I'm not sure it could get less efficient. Print to PDFs work by printing the document as an "image" and then essentially saving that inside of a PDF. Adobe Acrobat actually saves in a compressed ASCII format which is an order of magnitude or more efficient in terms of file size. MS Office would likely be the same.

PDFCReator

[Blahbooboo3]

I don't get this argument by Adobe. This software, PDFCREATOR, is free and lets you convert any document (including MS Office documents) to PDF.

What's the big deal? Is it that Adobe knows most users don't know that you don't have to buy Adobe Acrobat to make a PDF?


http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:Who's this going to hurt?

[wadetemp]

It depends on the software, but the Mac OS X Save As PDF most certainly does not just save an image inside the PDF. The text is fully selectable/searchable.

What does Microsoft want to do with the PDFs?

[macentric]

The greater question is what does Microsoft want to do with the Open Standard PDF. There is certain functionality of PDF that is included in the standard, and then are other parts that set it apart from the Adobe Acrobat Distiller product. Much of Adobe's use of PDF is set around print production and such is proprietary to their products. Many of these features do not react the way you would expect in program's like Apple's preview or other PDF viewers. There are a number of compression technologies that are not accessible outside of Acrobat Distiller. The question in my mind is does Microsoft want to include proprietary functions in their save to PDF functionality, or are they simply trying to print a PDF to a file?

If Microsoft is just going to use the open standard then there is not much Adobe can do. Example, Apple removed Display PostScript from the developer previews of Mac OS X because they did not want to pay for the licensing involved with Display PostScript. Instead they built their display model on the open PDF standard. They do not use Adobe code in their product.

Now that said if you open a complex Adobe PDF in Apple's preview IT WILL NOT LOOK CORRECT, especially if their is transparency in the document.

The other end of the spectrum is, does Microsoft want to "embrace and extend" the tehnology much like they did with JAVA, basically bastardazing the product and killing it for all intents and purposes so that they can push their own technology.

Apple, Open Office and PDF

[theolein]

At the risk of being redundant, I would just like to say that Apple does NOT license PDF from Adobe (OO I'm not so sure since it originates in Star Office which is from Sun). Adobe wanted Apple to license PDF back when the Quartz PDF graphic engine replaced the Postscript graphic engine (which was licensed from Adobe) from the NeXT days, but Apple declined and instead based their engine on the openly available PDF standard. This is also the reason that there are free PDF libraries for anything from Java to Perl. None of them are licensed but simply implement the standard.

Microsoft's attempt must use features that are not part of the standard, such as Layers or advanced color features.

Re:.doc vs .pdf

[Quarters]

Our you could get PDFCreator from Sourceforge and print to PDF from any Windows application.

You Adobe defenders are hypocritical (or ignorant)

[I'm Don Giovanni]

The hypocrisy on this site is astounding.

Consider this:
1. Adobe's market share in PDF creation software is similar to Microsoft's marketshare in desktop OSes for intel-compatible CPUs. Therefore, one could argue that Adobe has a "monopoly" in pdf creation software (not 100% share, but nearly so). But to keep some of you from bitching about the use of the term "monopoly" in this case, I'll use the term "quasi-monopoly".

2. Adobe, wanting to protect their "quasi-monopoly", was willing to allow Microsoft Office 2007 to export PDF if Microsoft charged extra for that functionality so as to not undercut the price of Adobe's own PDF creation software. In other words, Adobe wanted to engage in price-fixing with Microsoft in order to protect Adobe's quasi-monopoly. That is what you guys are supporting! Do you really want to go down that road? Surely you'll want to rethink your position, or does your hypocrisy really go that far?

3. Microsoft wasn't bastardizing PDF. What would be the point, since Microsoft is not producing any PDF reader? Since Microsoft isn't creating their own reader, any PDF document producted by Microsoft Office would have to be readable by other readers (and printable by printers), so why bastardize the format? Think logically.

4. If you want to see an example of the PDF produced by Office 2007, try Office 2007 beta 2. Or you can read the PDF version of the latest draft of the OpenXML ECMA spec [ecma-international.org], a PDF document that was created by Office 2007 beta. Guess what, it's perfectly readable by Acrobat Reader and any other PDF compliant reader.

5. Regarding XPS, XPS is a PDF competitor based on XML, but includes many advances over the current PDF spec (though future PDF specs may add such advances). XPS is part of Vista; XPS's role in Vista is similar to PDF's role in Mac OS X. Microsoft has shared with Adobe info on XPS for several years. Now Microsoft, bending over backwards to allay Adobe's hypocritcal paranoia, is removing from Office 2007 built-in support for both PDF and XPS. Furthermore, Microsoft is leaving it up to OEMs as to whether they want to include XPS support in Vista itself (except for XPS's role as a spool file format for Vista's printing enhacements).

6. Lastly, Microsoft is still going to provide PDF and XPS export support in Office 2007 as free downloadable plug-ins. Adobe's still pissed about this because they want Microsoft to charge for the plug-ins (more of the price-fixing scheme that you guys are supporting).

See these links for sources of the above info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/andy_simonds/archive/2006/06 /02/XPSAdobe.aspx [msdn.com]
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06/ 02/613702.aspx [msdn.com]
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06/ 03/616022.aspx [msdn.com]

Lastly, please don't you (or the state of MA) ever refer to PDF as "open" in the future. If it's not open for all, then it's not truly open, period.

Re:Maybe Adobe just got smart.

[joeykiller]

I think the reason is much simpler and not conspiratoric at all: Adobe sells an incredibly expensive ($299) version of the Adobe PDF software which, among other things, adds "Save to PDF" capabilities to Microsoft Office. I guess that a lot of licenses are sold on the Office Save to PDF functionality alone. With PDF writing built into Office, their market would be marginalized.

Personally I having Save to PDF built into Office would've been good for the PDF standard, and find it difficult to sympathize with Adobe on this one.

Re:Who's this going to hurt?

[evilviper]

Print to PDFs work by printing the document as an "image" and then essentially saving that inside of a PDF.

Absolutely, positively untrue, and I can't imagine where you cooked this idea up from.

Pretty much every program on the planet can print to Postscript, (that's certainly not an image-only format) and it's just a short jump from there to converting it into a PDF.

Re:Serves them right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Btw, I suspect that the main reason why Microsoft was going to support PDF was to ease the transition from XPS.

I thought MS announced PDF support to comply with Massachusetts' open formats policy [eweek.com].

Re:.doc vs .pdf

[de Siem]

ISO 19005-1 is PDF 1.4. There's a little bit more to just needing to be a pdf 1.4 in order to be compliant to ISO 19005-1. , such as no javascript allowed in the pdf, no encryption and all fonts must be embedded