Since this is not directly related to the original issue tracker entry for Pamphlet support in MathAction, I decided to move this discussion to the axiom-developer email list. Later I can put a summary on the web site if it seems useful.
On 7 Oct 2005 at 14:15, C Y wrote: > I must be misunderstanding something - AFAIK pdf isn't > proprietary. It's fully documented, and there is no > restriction on creating either viewers or generators for > it. In what sense it is more or less proprietary than > postscript or dvi or mathml? On October 7, 2005 10:37 PM michel.lavaud wrote: > The pdf format is proprietary _and_ fully documented - as > is the Word format. And what Microsoft did, Adobe can do > it: that is, he can decide some day to change the pdf format > in a way incompatible with previous versions (as MS did for > Word) ... I think this comparison to WORD is at best inaccurate. Even Richard Stallman - defender of free software - was willing to accept PDF format email attachments as early as 2002. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html In his recommended response to the receipt of an email with a WORD attachment he wrote: "You sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format, so I cannot read it. If you send me the plain text, HTML, or PDF, then I could read it." > > The most critical community against pdf lately were not > scientists but lawyers, because of Enron and other affairs, > that generated "tons" of electronic documents, and they > fear that these documents could become unreadable in > the long term. The problem of defining an A-pdf format > (Archival-pdf) was resurrected on this occasion. Apparently this movement was successful. :) So I think C Y is right. At least now there is a version of PDF that is no longer proprietary. It seems that PDF has recently been accepted as a standard by the International Standards Organization. "More exactly, it's ISO 19005-1:2005, "Document management- Electronic document file format for long-term preservation- Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1)". See: http://www.pdfzone.com/article2/0,1895,1859083,00.asp "ISO Approves PDF/A By Nettie Hartsock September 14, 2005 The International Organization for Standardization has approved PDF/A, a standard for creating PDF documents for long-term archiving. "This document will ensure that a PDF document will be rendered as it was created 50 years from now regardless of the reader used," said Betsy Fanning, director of standards and content for AIIM, a non-profit international organization dealing with enterprise content management. AIIM and NPES, an organization representing suppliers for the printing and publishing industries, initiated the work on a standard in 2002, said Fanning." "Fanning said the PDF/A standard defines an open file format for PDF archiving of electronic documents, with no proprietary language. PDF/A is a subset of PDF." On October 7, 2005 10:50 PM Tim Daly wrote: > -- > Actually, I continue to maintain the position that documents > should be available in SOURCE form, not pdf, not dvi, etc. > Only source allows you the ability to use the information > in any way. > Of course this depends on what you mean by "use". If you were a lawyer or historian and your purpose was to prove a point about authorship or priority of discovery, then most source documents in and of themselves would be of little use. PDF format at least does contain some limited information about the document (meta data) in addition to the ability to render (when it was created, by who, by what software etc.) On the other hand original source is ok *provided* that it is accompanied by a reliable long term archival storage. This is one of the functions provided by the eprint archive http://www.arXiv.org Although the arXiv still prefers to archive TeX source if possible (and derives other formats like PDF from these sources), it does permit submissions in PDF format. http://arxiv.org/help/submit_pdf ------------------------------- But in Axiom we are primarily talking about sharing scientific research via literate programming, i.e. mathematical documents that contain embedded computer algebra programs. Providing a document format like PDF which would allow source code to be extracted in a compilable form but not the original source text seems rather pointless. Perhaps what we need instead is a widely accepted archival service something like arXiv but which would accepts e-prints in a literate programming format. From this point of view, it seems to me that Tim's choice of noweb as the basis for Axiom's "pamphlet" format was a wise one. So one thing that I am trying to do with the new support for Pamphlet format on MathAction is to allow the creation of an archive of this kind. And because this approach is fully general, this also provides the basis for further development of the Axiom system itself which is already represented in the form of a complete set of pamphlet files. On MathAction pamphlet files are stored in their original source format but can be delivered in a variety of ways: as PDF documents (either embedded in HTML in the browser or downloaded as a separate file), dvi format documents, as complete noweb source documents, or individual source code chunks. MathAction also allows pamphlet files to edited directly over the web either within a browser text window or via the interface to an external editor such as emacs. Like other content on MathAction, notices of changes will be sent to email list subscribes and a history of recent changes to the source is also maintained (currently set for 30 days). I am also considering adding some typical developer tools such as 'diff' and 'patch', to allow pamphlet source to be compared to an offline copy and to update pamphlets by uploading and applying a standard patch file. Since it is also quite easy to directly extract the source text programmatically, say by a makefile running remotely, this means MathAction could function as a fully collaborative literate programming development environment. One could simply build a new completely up to date working copy of Axiom directly from the pamphlet files stored on MathAction. Although this is technically easy to accomplish with existing tools, given the rather low participation rate in developing collaborative content on MathAction so far, I am quite uncertain how successful this experiment might be with Axiom itself. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
