On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Crossfire wrote:
> Rick Welykochy was once rumoured to have said:
> > > 2. That software solutions will utilise true open standards,
> > > without proprietary extensions.
> > > (ASCII, HTML, RTF, PDF ... But NOT M$ Word)
> >
> > PDF: proprietary Abode format
>
> PDF is a published `standard' which is availible to the public.
...
> Both of these formats when used, are used to the letter of the
> availible documentation. They are not normally proprietarily
> extended.
PDF allows for anyone to extend the format from what is documented. It
just means that viewers who don't understand those extensions should
ignore them. The best example I have seen is Adobe Illustrator 9.0, which
actually saves into an extended version of PDF. This is called PDF 1.4 and
will be released with Acrobat 5 sometime soonish. Adobe has documented
these extentions on their website. There is nothing stopping me from
writing my own extensions too.
TIFF has a similar concept in it's tagging mechanism, which we use
extensively at work.
Mikal
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Michael Still ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
- Panda PDF Generation Library
(http://www.stillhq.com/cgi-bin/getpage?area=panda&page=index.htm)
- PandaLex PDF Parsing Library
(http://www.stillhq.com/cgi-bin/getpage?area=pandalex&page=index.htm)
- PandaScript PDF Scripting Interface
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- GPG Public Key at http://www.stillhq.com/mikal.asc and on pgp.net keyservers
"To read makes our speaking english good" -- Xander, Buffy the Vampire Slayer in "I
Robot, You Jane"
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