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>At 9:25 AM -0700 10/14/03, Duff Johnson wrote: >>The change you suggest would represent a significant plus, and if >>Leonard's issues ARE addressed, I do not (until / unless Leonard >>shines light on my marble head) see a minus. > > The minus is simply the fact that having two different places >for the same data in a document format means that one can never know >which is the current/valid set. This is one of (but certainly not >the only reason) why the PDF/A committee forbid /Info in their >documents. ... but if the info is sync-ed each time the file is saved... then each set is equivalent... no? > And since Adobe has already made a statement with Acrobat 6 >that XMP always wins over /Info regardless of which was actually >modified most recently, it seems quite logical for Adobe to take the >next step and just completely remove support for /Info in PDF >1.6/Acro 7. (obviously, Acrobat would still need to support older >PDF documents with /Info but no XMP) But if sync-ing were sufficiently rugged, this issue would go away. Perhaps there is reason not to trust the rugged-ness of the sync-ing methodology, or perhaps metadata could be changed without prompting a Save, but that's above my pay-grade. > You also need to consider that there are tools out there >today that know about the /Info but NOT the XMP - and are currently >updating them w/o regard for the above-mentioned change to Acro6. As >such, users are getting a MUCH MORE problematic experience than what >Lori described in her Email. And as long as Adobe continues to >support /Info, it will only get worse. One could also make the argument the other way. Discarding /Info would cause many current applications to break - HARD. Syncing might legitimately be seen as the right way to maintain a sufficient degree of backwards-compatibility. Otherwise, files saved with A7 would simply start to disappear off the radar of pre-A7 applications. That would be a GIANT no-no. If Adobe were to make the data sync, then advise all developers that by, shall we say, A9, /Info would be gone and XMP would be the ONLY metadata store in PDF... then the transition to XMP would be significantly more workable than otherwise. > Adobe needs to be out there pushing XMP and XMP toolkit on >developers and get them to move towards it for the standard metadata >for PDF (and other imaging formats) and away from things like /Info, >IPTC, etc. I agree totally... but pushing XMP by breaking every app that depends on /Info up-front would cause significant ire in the Enterprise environments where Adobe would like to rule. Some of these people have only recently woken up to the fact that A4 (and even A3 in some cases) is a little rusty! I suspect that Adobe takes (or should take) the view that the real-world "version lag" is far, far longer than anybody would want or expect. After all, since PDF is now a colossus, it makes sense to move key pieces of the infrastructure VERY VERY slowly to avoid catastrophic backwards compatibility hell. Duff Johnson Document Solutions, Inc. www.document-solutions.com To change your subscription: http://www.pdfzone.com/discussions/lists-pdfdev.html
