Thanks for the well thought out and articulate reply, André.
A distinction has to be maintained regarding finished documents and
working documents. And in the former, a further distinction needs to be
made between the media used to render the document.
On Fri, 4 May 2007, Andr� Wyrwa wrote:
... Adobe most of all is pushing for PDF to become something else than
just a pre-print format...it's being pushed towards being a document
interchange format.
It's great for the interchange of finished documents. For working
documents you have OpenDocument, TeX (and variants), SVG, etc.
... Rather PDF actually is replacing the printed document.
Or one could be more conservative and say that the ratio of finished
documents to printed documents is going up. For whatever reason, I would
guess that 1) more documents are being produced, 2) fewer are being
printed, 3) perhaps #2 is dependent on how many are actually read. ;)
Likewise, Adobe wishes for PDF to play the same role in terms of screen
presentation. ...
That would require a very, very drastic change in PDF characteristics.
The very things which make PDF great for interchange, fonts/typefaces,
fixed formatting and layout, make it terrible for current screens where
users will have differing visual preferences, resolutions, window sizes
and aspect ratios.
In contrast, when reading an online manual in HTML, for example, the
browser will resize the type if told to and will automatically wrap the
lines according to the window size: thin vertical rectangle, wide
horizontal rectangle or plain square all work well.
Another way, old screens have a 4:3 aspect ratio. New ones have 8:5 or
something like that. Whereas, A4 paper has approximately 5:7.
... Adobe wants to see PDF as the de facto standard content
interchange format. Interchange here meaning independent of:
- location
- platform
- application
- task
It does that very well for documents that do not need further editing.
... OpenDocument is a great Office document
format. But it is just that. As soon as you leave that scope, the
specification couldn't help but fail, because it is designed as an
office editable source file format. It is not designed as a generall
publication, collaboration or interchange format.
It's doubtful that any single document format will do everything. ODF is
great for Office Documents, for other things you have SVG, FLAC, etc.
But the major point here is: PDF is the digital equivalent to a piece of
paper. OpenDocument isn't.
Agreed. But as mentioned, paper (or its PDF incarnation) is a terminal
format. SVG, ODF, etc. are for working documents.
a) No, it doesn't make much sense to integrate a full fledged PDF to OOo
converter into OOo, neither to implement a full fledged do as much as
you can PDF editor. ...
Full agreement here.
b) There are already OpenSouce solutions that can do quite a bit of PDF
editing.
Can you point to a few? I've been curious to find one that will allow
manipulation of the document's metadata. I checked the Adobe sites and
related newsgroups a few years ago and found no useful info regarding that
or even an API for C or Perl.
c) Basic functionality like opening a PDF, splitting and re-arranging
pages, extracting content and the likes would make some sense.
It would, but if there are already other tools, it would be important to
prioritize development closer to OOo's core functions.
d) As a means of integrating collaboration assistance features in OOo,
PDF should be considered and functionality like adding notes and
comments, or possibly even merging them from an OOo document could make
quite a bit of sense.
Same thing. If there are already other tools available ...
-Lars
Lars Noodén ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Ensure access to your data now and in the future
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André.
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