Of course, now that Adobe has opened up the pdf format, this may
change. But for now, it's just not an editing format.
I agree that PDF is not an editing format. But it was never really
intended to be, it was intended to be a fixed presentation format.
Also, while it is only recently that PDF became a published ISO
open standard, it has been open since soon after its inception.
The first version of Acrobat did not sell well and had stiff
competition,
so Adobe gave away Acrobat Reader and granted royalty free use
to anyone who made applications to read or edit PDF documents
as a way to sell more copies of Acrobat. This is why OS X has
been able to have a built-in PDF engine from the beginning, and
why OpenOffice, StarOffice, and TeX mathematical typesetting
applications have had the ability to write their output to PDF for
quite a while now.
OS X's "print to PDF" feature is great, by the way. I use it regularly
when sending documents that the recipient doesn't need to edit
because that way I don't have to worry whether or not they can
read it. Leopard gained the ability for PDF's to have working
hyperlinks, at least for PDF's produced from Apple applications.
I know it's not as good as Acrobat, but it's good enough for me,
and it's free with the OS.
*************************************************************************
** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy **
** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ **
*************************************************************************
