Re: [svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
On 11/2/06, Doug Schepers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, please don't take what I say next personally. ;) Also, these are my views, not necessarily those of the SVG WG. I won't - don't worry! In exchange, you can't take my comment as attacks on SVG or the work of the committee... I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of SVG 1.0. From the beginning, SVG was intended to have rich text features, including textPath, text styling, and text positioning. Markers, rich colors, filters... all of these are SVG 1.0 features, and it is a misrepresentation to claim or insinuate otherwise. You are correct that markers and filters are certainly parts of SVG 1.0, as are text styling positioning...though they were certainly added during the process and not necessary things that were there at the beginning. But point taken! You are using a small subset of SVG. True. We are MUCH closer to SVG Tiny than to full SVG - and I will certainly revisit the Tiny spec, given your later comment on it's status to see if we are better served by leveraging that instead of SVG Full. Also, although today we are using this small subset to address our needs, it leaves us with a potentially huge growth path for the future based on comments such as these and customer requests during the trial period. I will certainly take your feedback back (that's part of my job, after all!) - and I HIGHLY recommend that any/all of you do send your comments in via Labs as well. The more we hear from real people, the more we know what you want. The benefits of using SVG in this case are not really clear (other than the benefits of XML in general [1]). The content cannot really be repurposed, or reliably derived from other SVG generators. I disagree with that, since the content CAN be repurposed and created from existing generators (or at least some of them). It also enables the use of the myriad of existing SVG libraries to consume the content, manipulate it, and regenerate as necessary. It enables the use of existing XSLT scripts for SVG for things such as search replace, restyling, etc. This is a real disappointment to me. Adobe is going from having one of the most complete SVG implementations, to have one of the least. I think the problem here is one of marketing :(. And I do understand your disappointment in not finding in Mars the replacement for ASV. But that's not it's goal - nor do I expect it will ever be. However, it is an EXCELLENT opportunity for the SVG community to leverage it's experience and tool set on a file format that will have a much wider impact (sorry to say it, but it's true). Taking off my Adobe hat for a second... _I_ was the one who (as a 3rd party developer) fought for the use of SVG for Mars's page content. It's something, that you know from my participation here over the years, that I believe in. Even in the subset that it is today, the use of SVG as part of Mars continues to breath life into SVG - and in my opinion will only HELP to bring it back to the mainstream! I'm hoping that Adobe will come around once again to see the benefits of really using SVG (in print and on the Web). If you are looking for Adobe to adopt SVG as a replacement for Flash or PDF - it's simply not going to happen.(and any discussion on this can go to /dev/null) HOWEVER, there is an EXCELLENT opportunity for SVG to thrive (albiet in a limited form) inside of Mars. We had SVG in PDF before - and Adobe took it away (because it wasn't documented/supported). NOW, it's the basis for EVERYTHING that gets rendered on the viewed/printed page. That's a HUGE leap, though I can also understand why you see it as baby steps. I'll call bullshit on any PR attempts to make sunshine out of shadows. I'd rather have you support me and the Mars team in promoting SVG and keeping it alive and well inside of Adobe - instead of giving people reason to drop it again :(. Who knows - if the reaction from the world about our use of SVG is positive - maybe we can add more and more support for additional features. But if it's negative, the chances of that are going to be pretty slim. As you may be aware, now that SVG Tiny 1.2 is in CR phase (that is, in the can, so to speak), work has resumed on SVG-Print, aiming at just the high-end printing market you describe. Well... I personally think that the SVGPrint committee would be better served in working with us (Adobe) to bring Mars to a standards body (ISO, AIIM, etc.) as the basis for SVG-based printing. We've solved the problem...We use SVG...And as it is simply an alternate representation of PDF, it will have greater traction in the print publishing industry than anything coming from an unknown (to that world) group. open print graphics standard that will address market needs without reverting to proprietary formats. That's Mars. 100% based on open standards. Just not (yet!) a
Re: [svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
Hi, Leonard- Leonard Rosenthol wrote: On 11/2/06, Doug Schepers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, please don't take what I say next personally. ;) Also, these are my views, not necessarily those of the SVG WG. I won't - don't worry! In exchange, you can't take my comment as attacks on SVG or the work of the committee... Nope. :) FWIW, it's a Working Group (WG), not a committee... the difference being that we don't merely oversee the development of SVG, we get our hands dirty and write the technical aspects of the spec itself. You are using a small subset of SVG. True. We are MUCH closer to SVG Tiny than to full SVG - and I will certainly revisit the Tiny spec, given your later comment on it's status to see if we are better served by leveraging that instead of SVG Full. Closer, but SVG Tiny still has advanced text capabilities. I totally understand why you wouldn't include declarative animation for a print spec (needless overhead for static content), but the text styling and textPath are desirable there. The benefits of using SVG in this case are not really clear (other than the benefits of XML in general [1]). The content cannot really be repurposed, or reliably derived from other SVG generators. I disagree with that, since the content CAN be repurposed and created from existing generators (or at least some of them). It also enables the use of the myriad of existing SVG libraries to consume the content, manipulate it, and regenerate as necessary. This assumes that you have sufficient control over the generator to restrict its output to the subset of SVG that Mars supports, which is quite an assumption. That Mars's subset is not a proper profile of SVG complicates this even further. As an aside, the text generator you're using for your sample content (presumably the same one as in Illustrator?) is making rather chopped-up text. It looks fine from a visual perspective, and will certainly print fine, but at the XML level, it's cruddy. For example, in mars_sample_files\1_Basic Document\page\0\pg.svg, there are 2 instances of the word consumer, but doing a text search will only find one... because the first instance is broken up thus: text ... c/texttext ...onsumer/text (for no apparent reason, not even at a line break... maybe it's for kerning? But SVG has a mechanism for that... ). From an XML perspective, that's a step back from HTML. If your intended audience expects to be able to use Mars files digitally, including search capabilities, you should fix that. I'd be happy to give you advice. This is a real disappointment to me. Adobe is going from having one of the most complete SVG implementations, to have one of the least. I think the problem here is one of marketing :(. And I do understand your disappointment in not finding in Mars the replacement for ASV. No, I wasn't expecting that. But there are needless restrictions on content that would be appropriate for print. But that's not it's goal - nor do I expect it will ever be. However, it is an EXCELLENT opportunity for the SVG community to leverage it's experience and tool set on a file format that will have a much wider impact (sorry to say it, but it's true). No, it's not true. It may be an informed opinion, and it may even be likely, but it's not a fact. Just because Adobe backs something doesn't guarantee its success (or even that Adobe will see it through the gates). Meanwhile, SVG Tiny is storming over the mobile world, and is becoming natively supported across browsers (just one more to go). No offense, but I think you're looking at this measure of success through document-centric glasses, rather than as documents and applications and graphics. Of course, this is just *my* opinion. Taking off my Adobe hat for a second... _I_ was the one who (as a 3rd party developer) fought for the use of SVG for Mars's page content. It's something, that you know from my participation here over the years, that I believe in. I have no doubt in your personal intent, and I thank you for your dedication to open standards. Even in the subset that it is today, the use of SVG as part of Mars continues to breath life into SVG - and in my opinion will only HELP to bring it back to the mainstream! It's possible. I'm hoping that Adobe will come around once again to see the benefits of really using SVG (in print and on the Web). If you are looking for Adobe to adopt SVG as a replacement for Flash or PDF - it's simply not going to happen.(and any discussion on this can go to /dev/null) No, I am realistic enough to not consider that for a moment. It *could* support SVG in its Flash player (as Macromedia claimed for FlashLite), but I don't see that happening either. HOWEVER, there is an EXCELLENT opportunity for SVG to thrive (albiet in a limited form) inside of Mars. We had SVG in PDF before - and Adobe took it
[svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
Hi Leonard, --- In svg-developers@yahoogroups.com, Leonard Rosenthol [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10/31/06, Andreas Neumann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Seems like SVG is not yet dead inside Adobe. Not at all! This is good to hear! Thanks for letting us know that you work for Adobe now. We certainly know you well from your PDF and SVG inside PDF expertise. You can also read about it on my blog at http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr. As you'll see, I am also now with Adobe and one of my responsibilities is the evangelization (is that a real word?!?!) of Mars. As I understand it, Mars will be a plugin to Acrobat Reader and full version. The same like it was with the image viewer plugin. This is sad. Are there plans to make it a fixed component of Acrobat, so that users don't have to download another plugin to view SVG content inside Acrobat? In addition to Mars, the new Digital Editions project from Adobe also supports static SVG inside of XHTML-based eBooks. yes, interesting. But, the SVG support is not really mentioned at the project page. It mentions XHTML, but not SVG. It seems like SVG continues to live within Adobe but its sort of a hidden life now that they aquired Macromedias Flash technology. They seem to be afraid of mentioning SVG in the public ... As an example, if one visits http:// labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions/faq.html it does not mention SVG at all, despite the fact that from several sources I heard that SVG is supported as a static format, without filters and animation. As an Adobe customer I am a bit confused by all the different products/plugins, etc. Adobe is offering. Why so many different viewers and plugins that sort of do the same thing? Well, but thats more a question to the responsible product managers. Hopefully at some day, they converge to fewer products/viewers. Thanks for sharing your information Leonard. Andreas - To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
--- In svg-developers@yahoogroups.com, Leonard Rosenthol [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10/31/06, Andreas Neumann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Seems like SVG is not yet dead inside Adobe. Not at all! Here is another project by Adobe to embed static SVG inside a Mars file format, which is basically a zip folder containing xml files (one per page) which links to SVG/PNG/JPEG/JPEG2000 files. You can also read about it on my blog at http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr. As you'll see, I am also now with Adobe and one of my responsibilities is the evangelization (is that a real word?!?!) of Mars. In addition to Mars, the new Digital Editions project from Adobe also supports static SVG inside of XHTML-based eBooks. Leonard newly minted, Technical Standards Evangelist Adobe Systems Leonard Thanks for the info. I was interested until I looked at the specs on your site. I am currently using Batik to convert SVG to PDF and thought Mars would be a far easier solution. However the following missing features are killers for what I do. 1. No CSS attrubutes in SVG. While XML attributes are possible, it is just easier in some cases to use style attributes in SVG. The lack of support in Mars will make this very difficult. 2. No textPath support. This is a killer for me. PostScript support s this - why not Mars?? 3. No text-anchor support except start. Specifing the center of a piece of text and having it centered regardless of the length is essential. 4. No marker support. I use markers hundreds of times in a display. 5. No font selection. I can't even specify font-size=bold ? 6. No filter support. 7. color spaces. This whole section confused me but it appears you can't use the standard RGB or HSV spaces and have to create Adobe stardard binary files with lookup tables in separate directories in the archive. Others on this list may have other concerns. The reference is at: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/mars/mars_reference.pdf See the section of SVG features excluded from Mars. I am posting this here so others using SVG can give other comments as well. I think the idea of a zipped archive with SVG as the main rendering language is great but it will not be usable for what I do with the limitations listed above. Bruce Rindahl - To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
On 11/2/06, Andreas Neumann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As I understand it, Mars will be a plugin to Acrobat Reader and full version. Initially, this is true. Remember that, TODAY, Mars is just a technology preview from Adobe. It is not (yet) a product or an official deliverable. We have some great ideas here and we want to share them and recieve feedback from the community on them. I think it is safe to assume(!) that when we deliver a customer ready version of Mars, it would be integrated with our solutions directly. It seems like SVG continues to live within Adobe but its sort of a hidden life now that they aquired Macromedias Flash technology. I can't speak for the myriad of groups inside Adobe, let alone for marketing ;)...however, I can give you my OPINION...I think that since we are using subsets of SVG in these evolving technologies, we want to be sure not to give people the wrong impression (eg. that we are doing a complete implementation ala ASV). As an Adobe customer I am a bit confused by all the different products/plugins, etc. Don't feel bad...you're not alone... Hopefully at some day, they converge to fewer products/viewers. AMEN Leonard - To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
On 11/2/06, brucerindahl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for the info. I was interested until I looked at the specs on your site. I am currently using Batik to convert SVG to PDF and thought Mars would be a far easier solution. Depending on what you are doing, and when/how you plan to deliver your solution - it might be. Though certainly it's not something you could easily jump on today! 1. No CSS attrubutes in SVG. While XML attributes are possible, it is just easier in some cases to use style attributes in SVG. The lack of support in Mars will make this very difficult. We are simply following the SVG committee itself in the movement away from CSS to attributes - because attributes are more in line with XML philosophy and can be MUCH more easily validated schema'd. 2. No textPath support. This is a killer for me. PostScript support s this - why not Mars?? PDF isn't Postscript. PDF isn't a dynamic reflow format. textPath requires a text layout engine and that isn't what PDF is about. 3. No text-anchor support except start. Specifing the center of a piece of text and having it centered regardless of the length is essential. See comment above about reflow and layout. 4. No marker support. I use markers hundreds of times in a display. I suspect that the reason for this is similar to the above - the need for dynamic content - but I don't know for certain. I will, however, find out for you. 5. No font selection. I can't even specify font-size=bold ? Font selection is fully supported - in the same way that it is for PDF and Postscript. What you are asking for is font styling, which isn't a concept in the PDF and Postscript world...thus it's not part of Mars. 6. No filter support. See above comments about dynamic layout/view. 7. color spaces. This whole section confused me but it appears you can't use the standard RGB or HSV spaces and have to create Adobe stardard binary files with lookup tables in separate directories in the archive. Sorry about the confusion here...You can, OF COURSE, use standard RGB values for the colors using any of the standard SVG forms. It's only for those needing more complex colors that you have to go fancier. Leonard - To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
The loss of CSS styling is not a big one for myself. I initially used them a lot but am moving away gradually for several reasons. The lack of some of the text features, markers and textpath hurts and is certainly a problem when it comes to creating maps on demand or other more complex graphics. All these features initially drew me to SVG. I am sure, the smart guys at Adobe will find a way to convert those incompatible higher level bits to lower level PDF equivalents, if all the XSL-FO products, Batik, Apple Webkit, etc. can do it. It certainly is a challenge to map all of SVGs features to PDF, but so is it to map swf or any other format to PDF. For the long run I hope that Adobe Mars will support all the static SVG features when it targets the print world with Mars. In the other Adobe project, digital editions, where interactive E- Books are the goal, the animation and scripting features of SVG would certainly make sense for the long run. I can understand if things develop over time and not all of SVG works from the start, but for the long run it is my hope that Adobe will support more of SVG. Otherwise its sort of like Macromedias claim to support SVGT in FlashLite or Flex, but then they did it in such a crippled way that it wasn't really usable, with the main goal to put that we support SVG sticker on their product. If that is the plan it would be better to tell potential customers in advance and not start fueling any false hopes. But as usual I am optimistic and will give it a try. I agree with you Leonard, that for many projects, a SVG subset is already usable/ useful. Andreas --- In svg-developers@yahoogroups.com, Leonard Rosenthol [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 11/2/06, brucerindahl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for the info. I was interested until I looked at the specs on your site. I am currently using Batik to convert SVG to PDF and thought Mars would be a far easier solution. Depending on what you are doing, and when/how you plan to deliver your solution - it might be. Though certainly it's not something you could easily jump on today! 1. No CSS attrubutes in SVG. While XML attributes are possible, it is just easier in some cases to use style attributes in SVG. The lack of support in Mars will make this very difficult. We are simply following the SVG committee itself in the movement away from CSS to attributes - because attributes are more in line with XML philosophy and can be MUCH more easily validated schema'd. 2. No textPath support. This is a killer for me. PostScript support s this - why not Mars?? PDF isn't Postscript. PDF isn't a dynamic reflow format. textPath requires a text layout engine and that isn't what PDF is about. 3. No text-anchor support except start. Specifing the center of a piece of text and having it centered regardless of the length is essential. See comment above about reflow and layout. 4. No marker support. I use markers hundreds of times in a display. I suspect that the reason for this is similar to the above - the need for dynamic content - but I don't know for certain. I will, however, find out for you. 5. No font selection. I can't even specify font-size=bold ? Font selection is fully supported - in the same way that it is for PDF and Postscript. What you are asking for is font styling, which isn't a concept in the PDF and Postscript world...thus it's not part of Mars. 6. No filter support. See above comments about dynamic layout/view. 7. color spaces. This whole section confused me but it appears you can't use the standard RGB or HSV spaces and have to create Adobe stardard binary files with lookup tables in separate directories in the archive. Sorry about the confusion here...You can, OF COURSE, use standard RGB values for the colors using any of the standard SVG forms. It's only for those needing more complex colors that you have to go fancier. Leonard - To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
On 11/2/06, Andreas Neumann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The lack of some of the text features, markers and textpath hurts and is certainly a problem when it comes to creating maps on demand or other more complex graphics. The issue is that although we are using SVG syntax, we are using it for a different purpose than a true SVG viewer. We are using it in a way similar to the original 1.0 (eg. a pre-layed out static rendering) as opposed to the more modern dynamic rendering of 1.1 and 1.2. What you need to remember, is that Mars does NOT contain an SVG rendering engine. It's not our intent to reinvent ASV inside of PDF. Instead, we are using SVG (a standard XML grammar) as a way to represent PDF graphics. This is true for all parts of Mars. It's NOT a replacement for PDF - it's just another way to represent/serialize the existing data objects. For the long run I hope that Adobe Mars will support all the static SVG features when it targets the print world with Mars. Mars extends SVG to support numerous high end printing feature that are present in PDF but not standard SVG (or even SVG-P(rint)) such as Overprinting and Knockout. Leonard - To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
Leonard Thanks for you comments and clarifications. I mentioned Postscript mainly because some of the syntax is similar to SVG. Also, anything done by Postscript(Adobe Language) can be converted to PDF (Adobe format) via Acrobat (Adobe product). This is how I made the connection. As Andreas mentioned, there are other applications that are doing this. The some features of SVG (like animation and interactive DOM scripting) of course make no sense to a static PDF format so none of these were mentioned. I do think the text-layout engine should be reconsidered. Simple things like a caption for a picture look much better centered rather than left justified. Detailed graphs for documents also look much better with some text layout properties. Cartography is also an area where this is essential. I think the idea is a good one, but I hope enough features are included to make it as a full companion to PDF. Thanks Bruce Rindahl - To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[svg-developers] Re: Adobe Mars: static SVG inside PDF
Hi, Leonard- Congrats on your new post. Your experience with PDF and SVG make you a valuable team member for Adobe, I'm sure. So, please don't take what I say next personally. ;) Also, these are my views, not necessarily those of the SVG WG. Leonard Rosenthol wrote: On 11/2/06, Andreas Neumann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The lack of some of the text features, markers and textpath hurts and is certainly a problem when it comes to creating maps on demand or other more complex graphics. The issue is that although we are using SVG syntax, we are using it for a different purpose than a true SVG viewer. We are using it in a way similar to the original 1.0 (eg. a pre-layed out static rendering) as opposed to the more modern dynamic rendering of 1.1 and 1.2. I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of SVG 1.0. From the beginning, SVG was intended to have rich text features, including textPath, text styling, and text positioning. Markers, rich colors, filters... all of these are SVG 1.0 features, and it is a misrepresentation to claim or insinuate otherwise. What you need to remember, is that Mars does NOT contain an SVG rendering engine. It's not our intent to reinvent ASV inside of PDF. Instead, we are using SVG (a standard XML grammar) as a way to represent PDF graphics. This is true for all parts of Mars. It's NOT a replacement for PDF - it's just another way to represent/serialize the existing data objects. You are using a small subset of SVG. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it doesn't make you conformant to any standard, any more than using the p, ul, and table elements in isolation in some other format would make that format conforming HTML. The benefits of using SVG in this case are not really clear (other than the benefits of XML in general [1]). The content cannot really be repurposed, or reliably derived from other SVG generators. As it stands, it only works within your particular environment, undercutting the whole point of an open standard. This is a real disappointment to me. Adobe is going from having one of the most complete SVG implementations, to have one of the least. I'm afraid I have to agree with Andreas here, though without his optimism. Using SVG in this way sounds like a superficial marketing bulletpoint. Don't get me wrong. I'm hoping that Adobe will come around once again to see the benefits of really using SVG (in print and on the Web). But this ain't it, and I'll call bullshit on any PR attempts to make sunshine out of shadows. For the long run I hope that Adobe Mars will support all the static SVG features when it targets the print world with Mars. Mars extends SVG to support numerous high end printing feature that are present in PDF but not standard SVG (or even SVG-P(rint)) such as Overprinting and Knockout. As you may be aware, now that SVG Tiny 1.2 is in CR phase (that is, in the can, so to speak), work has resumed on SVG-Print, aiming at just the high-end printing market you describe. It would be great if Adobe (and everyone else) were to contribute a list of features that are needed, so that we can have an open print graphics standard that will address market needs without reverting to proprietary formats. [1] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/message/53513 Regards- -Doug - To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click edit my membership Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
