Hi All, I realise that the Scribus community uses PDF for particular reasons, and so this may be a little off-topic.
However, I have struggled this week with various PDF documents I have received that are incompatable with my various PDF readers in a variety of ways. What is needed is a document format that is designed for the easy and accurate exchange of documents. Sadly, Adobe are taking PDF in much same direction that Microsoft took the Word file-format, where frequent changes to the format meant that folks were forever playing version catch-up. I realise that Adobe always intended to make money from the PDF format, and that changes to the format are a natural way for them to accomplish that, but if I can't successfully read the PDF documents that I receive or download, then PDF is no use to me as a portable document format. What I am looking for is a document format that is open enough that anyone who wishes can build a reader and/or creator for it can. The format needs to have similar power and abilities to PDF. The format should also be "XML compatable", in that if it isn't stored in XML (which does compress fairly well), then it should be easily rendered into XML, so that a text editor can be used to make changes. I am aware of SGML Document Interchange Format, but SGML seems to have gone out of favour. Does anyone know of a format that fits the requirements I've described, or could be made to? All replies gratefully received. Cheers! Nik.
