Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (6210 mails)

[Roger Oberholtzer <roger@xxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 12:45 -0400, James Knott wrote: 
> Sid Boyce wrote:
> > James Knott wrote:
> >> Sid Boyce wrote:
> >> Any bets
> >>
> >>> on their decision to support PDF in the next version of Office just to
> >>> tow the line that the state of Massachusetts dictated is likely to
> >>> produce PDF's that can't be read properly on other than Windows Vista?
> >>
> >>
> >> My understanding of the PDF licence is that if you use the term "PDF" it
> >> has to be compliant.  If your product produces files that won't work
> >> with others, it can't use the term PDF.
> >>
> > 
> > Yes but .... You and I are not Microsoft, neither do we possess their
> > magical powers for "innovation", so they can give you an output that's
> > not as nice to look at or read as under Vista. May be I'm an old cynic.
> > Regards
> > Sid.
> 
> ISTR that they did the same thing with their version of Java.
> Eventually, Sun won.

But would PFD work as such a storage format? It implies that you can
edit it. After all, current Word can make non-editable (by Word, at
least) PDF (via whatever mechanisims).  If it is to be editable, would
the PDF doc really contain all the needed formatting markers for
reliable and complete editing? I would imagine that any openDoc file
could move from one editor to another and be reasonably edited. Mainly
because the openDoc spec was written with this in mind. But PDF can come
from anywhere. And all PDF sources do not have editing in mind. So, I
suspect that MS just do not want to give in to OSS (even though their
new cluster stuff uses OSS MPI - a first use of OSS by MS) and are
thinking that PDF will let them meet the letter of the law and, as it
has limits for this use, make the adopters of those requirement re-think
the utility of the requirement. Of course, given that those who decided
to adopt this strategy seem to have a clue, perhaps they will not be ao
easily disuaded.


--

Roger