Kaiwai Gardiner wrote:
And with ODF and XPS (from Microsoft), is PDF relevant any longer?
You (and others suggesting this) are kidding, right?
Even *if* XPS turns out to be much more feature-compelling then PDF,
there are several too-large obstacles:
1) Even if new documents start to be produced in XPS format, there are
too many existing PDFs you'll still want to view.
2) ODF doesn't count, since it doesn't guarantee documents will render
identically, which is most of the selling point of PDF. PDFs normally
cannot be edited, which is also part of the point for many people.
3) There are a ton of existing platforms and tools (many, used by
"creative professionals", written by Adobe and Apple) which are heavily
geared to creating PDFs. You may need to wait a while before these
create XPS...
4) And of course, if XPS becomes successful, Microsort is just as
likely as Adobe to extend the format and drop support for less-common OS's.
OTOH, Apple shows that it's possible to live without Acroread, given
that the default PDF viewer on MacOS X is an Apple program called
"preview", not Acroread.
It's true that there are a few things that preview can't handle - mostly
editable PDF forms and things like different page transition types
used by things like Photoshop PDFs. But it shows it *is* possible to
ship an OS with a different PDF viewer. Provided you dedicate the
people to make this work of course.
Hugh.
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