When Bill Gates showed off the new Metro document format in Longhorn at a hardware conference last week, some analysts were quick to call it a PDF killer.
Microsoft gunning for Adobe’s PDF format?
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Eugenia Loli
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Yeah, right after they kill iTunes, Playstation, Palm and everything else. Jeezz, just stick to winblows and orifice.
Microshaft can’t kill this format because PDF documents are too numerous. They are everywhere on the net.
Call me when I can freely create print view and edit documents in this format on HPUX, AIX, Solaris Sparc, Solaris X86, MacOS, Windows, SCOUX, Linux PPC, Linux X86, Linux Zos, Linux Alpha, BeOS, VMS, PalmOS and MVS.
THEN WE can talk about being a replacement for PDF.
Until then its just another useless Microsoft attempt at locking people into a file format.
Here’s an educated comment…
All the recent hype news from MS is because of Tiger and Linux.
Here’s why:
MS has started a HUGE marketing campaign to draw attention AWAY from the threats it is now facing from Linux and Apple.
1) Linux, because it cannot be stopped, but MS is trying to confuse you with whatever FUD possible and divert you away from their horrible security track record.
2) Apple, to try and draw attention to the “future technologies” to be included in Longhorn. None of which Microsoft invented, but they will try to convince you that they did and that theirs is better.
3) All of this is because MS has nothing to deliver to market right now that can compete with Linux and Apple technologies. So in lieu of product MS resorts to marketing campaigns and HYPE for “what’s to come” from Longhorn, Metro, WinFS, etc…
The truth is that MS has no substantial technologies to deliver anytime soon if ever.
Vaporware and hype
… except for the “portable” part, since it currently own runs on Windows. But apart from the “portable” part, it’s just like portable document format.
I can’t wait to see the day that PDFs die. Acrobat Reader is bloated, takes too long to load and consumes 100% CPU utilization just to scroll through a document. And this is on a fairly recent Athlon XP system. Anything would be better even if it sacrificed portability.
If Microsoft made this technology built into Windows then it could easily defeat PDF. People are lazy. Their not going to bother downloading Acrobat Reader (20MB+)if something similar is built into the OS.
Yeah, Acrobat Reader wastes too much but…have you tried xpdf, evince…?
If you are a windows user, I dont know too much about windows pdf readers, but xpdf is great and it has a windows version, maybe it works fine under windows as under *NIX
Actually, I think it would be cool if MS integrated their own basic PDF support into the OS, including replacing Acrobat Reader, much as Apple has. I think they should do that even if they also include this new Metro format.
BTW Global Graphics, the company that worked on the Metro spec with MS, also sells a range of PDF creation products (including JAWS PDF Creator), and will be licensing Metro rendering code to printer manufacturers (and perhaps software developers wanting to support Metro on non-Longhorn platforms).
http://www.globalgraphics.com/articles/metro/
It sounds to me like it’s not only MS that wants a piece of Adobe’s PDF and PS pie.
The metro format is an openformat thats has been posted to the necessary boards for an official OK. so they can easily be ported to linux and other places unlike assinine overbloated adobe.
Name an adobe product that isnt bloated i havent found 1
While Adobe PDF has some issues, if it ever gets killed off by MS inferior product, I will be done with computers for ever, it aint worth being a slave. But that won’t happen anytime soon so no worries. MS simply can’t bury everything.
My Athlon also takes too long to open these PDFs, BePDF feels more responsive but doesn’t read all of them.
I use GobeProductive3 on Windows to write PDFs, I do wish it would get it right though and its pretty crashy, it messes up justified paragraphs.
Can anyone list the better free PDF writers for Windows, I find google searches to be hopeless these days, all they find is trialware.
Well, analysts and reporters need drama, because the industry is so freaking boring. Plus drama helps to drag eyeballs into your article.
Whatever.
The Metro stuff sounds like an implementation of Apple’s old QuickDraw printing methodology: you draw into your printing space, and instead of printing you print to a document. Then the imaging architecutre takes that document and spools it back to the screen.
It’s great, because you don’t have to have a dedicated viewer – you just need to be able to play back the information.
Saying this is like PDF is like saying that MS Paint competes with Photoshop. Only a moron (or an editor) would belive this stuff.
This is a good one. There are others, but this one is open source too.
pdfcreator:
http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.htm
You can export your documents to pdf, file->export as PDF, to create beautyfull pdfs in openoffice.
At least Apple are gonna use it…remember display pdf engine…:)
Preview on the mac os x, is adobe reader done right. I can open a document in a second or so, versus taking 5 minutes to start adobe reader. It is way bloated, for what it’s advertised to do.
I hope Metro is not just hype.
PDF as a document format just plainly SUXED all these years cause there is still no sensible way to edit them but to buy the $450 Acrobat Pro – $ more than the whole MS Office.
I was hoping for a while that competition with Macromedia “Flash-paper” would ease the price point, but we all know how it ended.
Compared to Adobe, Microsoft is a lesser evil. It devours sometimes, but regurgetates lots of (semi-)free stuff back to community.
I was glad to see the “Office Document Imaging” in Office 2003 and I think was a good start. I hope it’s not just a bluf and Metro hits Adobe where it hurts.
Sorry to submit 3 times…why is there not a flag to catch dupes? Who’s the dupe who’s writing this software.
well, i found the 6 series to be incredibly slow and unwieldy.. so i used 4.0 or thereabouts, and i was good with that .. heard the 7 was fast, and moved to that.. it’s tolerable
also, checked around, and there are instructions to disable a lot of the plugins 6 loads, and drastically improve the speed.
always found mozilla/firefox integration with it sucked, however.. again, this has gotten better, i suppose..
i don’t see why we need a PDF replacement, though,.. what would be the benefits? just get a better reader..
As a Pre-Press Professional this is just down right scary. All we need is another file format that non-trained idiots can create, then supply to a bureau and expect some form of quality result. God help us all!!!!
There’s enough dramas with PDF let along throwing another file format into the mix…
Sorry, but every time Micro$haft comes up with something new format for something they end up screwing our office up. Every time I read about “Metro” I cannot help but think of the Village People. I can see it now, a new sappy Micro$haft commercial with guys dancing around singing…
Boss: “Bob, is that human resources manual ready yet?”
Bob: “Yes sir it is and I did it with Microsoft’s Metro!”
**begin singing and dance routine**
…
“Metro, Metro manual
I gotta me a Metro manual
Metro, Metro manual
I gotta me a Metro manual”
…
I can’t wait to see it go the way of their other bad ideas (i.e. Microsoft Bob)
PDF is a file format, NOT a program!!! it is not PDFs fault that Adobe cannot write a decent reader program for it. us a PDF on OS X or Linux.. it opens in seconds.
just use Latex.
umm.. you create a PDF to NOT edit them. if you are sending out a document to a bunch of people, why use word? you want them to READ IT, not edit it. if you want to be able to create PDFs and edit the content of them later on because you revised the info, the use either Open office or Latex (latex is nicer because you get much more power and a lot less issues with presentation)
Well I use PDF speed up
you can get it from
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/PDF-SpeedUp.shtml
it disables lots of plugins which are usually not needed. If you need those plugins then you can enable them again
Oh my god… all these comments i read here… The level of most replies was almost as stupid as the slashdot anonymous coward trolls…
Some things: PDF is a good format, Adoble allows it to use by anyone, anyone can make their own implementation. (PS was by Adobe too by the way)
PDF IS NOT slow ! That’s the same thing as saying that jpeg is slow ? Or that html is slow ? Or that .doc is slow ? PDF is just a format… PDF is not adobe reader ! There are may PDF readers available. Most Linux distro’s include a few of them (xpdf, kpdf,….), Mac OS X includes support for them. MS could just as will implement PDF support in their OS, and i’m sure it would be really fast ! (the new adobe reader 7 isn’t that slow by the way, 5 was’nt either, and for most pdf, you can still use 5).
PDF creation ? Lots of applications allow this. Many program allow direct creation of PDF (e.g. in linux), also some graphical windows software allows this, I believe openoffice.org allows this + their exist lots of free pdf printers/writers. E.g. I have used CutePDF before in windows. There’s no reason why MS couldn’t implement it in their Office suite for instance.
Yes, Adobe Acrobat Professional IS expensive. Yes it’s the best tool to edit PDF, but then again, you’re not really supposed to edit a PDF… just add some notes to it at most. When you need to edit a PDF, you should be editing it’s source, not the PDF itself. Think of PDF traditionaly as the equivalent of formatted paper documents, you don’t change the font of your computer manuals don’t you ? You don’t insert text in your newspaper, don’t you ? At most, you draw lines under some title, or cut some text or images from the document.
About Metro…. MS tells it will offer it’s format royalty free (just like Adobe does with it’s PDF), so this would allow developpers to implement their own implementation, an ony platform… I don’t see why someone complained and posted a long list of platforms ? Just develop a tool for it, like they did for PDF…
And if it’s integreded in the next Windows version, it might push PDF away ( i hope not ) … people ARE lazy, and why would you export to pdf (or even download a pdf writer), and a pdf reader when there’s a format that integrated in the OS and in all your standard dialogs?
By the way, according to MS the Metro format is an XML format… Seems we’re get an extremely verbose filetype, large filesizes, unnecessary complex parsers…
Oh well, we’ll see… I hope PDF will survive
I cannot stand these “PDF is bad since Adobe Reader is bloated and Acrobat is expensive” statements any longer. It is *so* boring.
Windows users who don’t like Adobe Reader can try one of these:
http://foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/get851.htm
Macintosh users can try the built-in preview application.
Linux/UNIX/X11 users can try one of these:
– GhostView (see above)
– xpdf
– xpdf-frontends like gpdf, kpdf or evince
*Nobody* is forced to use Adobe Reader since it’s an open platform.
As far as it concerns editing:
For all systems (command-line, GPL):
http://accesspdf.com/pdftk/
For Windows and Macintosh there are hundreds of GUI applications, both commercial and freeware, see here:
http://pdfstore.com/
http://www.pdfzone.com/
My favourite freeware GUI application for Windows (German):
http://freepdfxp.de/
Complaining about PDF because Acrobat is too expensive is just as clever as complaining about JPEG because Photoshop is too expensive. When buying Acrobat, you pay for the name as well, so choose an alternative if you would like to save money. There are lots of them!
But: I’m sure that MS will get the job done once again. Bundling their stuff with the monopoly OS will make it. And they will once again win the OSS community like they did with .NET and Mono, and later they will use their patents.
try this:
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
ill hope it helps
PDF is a fantastic file format. One of the most versatile, robust and simple file formats available today.
Fact of the matter is, most of the posters here are naive to the power of PDF, and how wide spread it is.
I can guarantee 90% of people using the PDF format do not give a toss about how fast a document loads, or how much system resources it is consuming. They care about one thing. Can they open it, and can they other guy open it?
Thats it.
To add to that, Im keen to see what the MS Metro file format turns out like. I’d love to see MS make it truly cross compatible, and build some cool features that make it substantially better than PDF.
But I think it will have a hard time becoming a PDF replacement. Lets wait and see.
You forgot AmigaOS, MorphOS, AROS(?), SkyOS(?), Syllable(?), ..
From http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Goes_After_PDF_with_Metro…
For users running Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Microsoft will make available a Metro viewer akin to Adobe Reader. Despite the similarities, Microsoft says that, “Fixed document formats are just one small aspect of what both Metro and PDF provide.”
“PDF provides a broad scope of solutions for information workers, one aspect of which is a fixed document format. Metro is aimed at solving a specific set of challenges in the document lifecycle, including viewing, sharing and printing,” a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews.
“PostScript will continue to be fully supported on Windows. Microsoft and Adobe will continue to work jointly to develop the Windows PostScript driver,” the spokesperson added.
From http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1789314,00.asp
Microsoft officials, predictably, denied that the company is gunning for Adobe with Metro.
“One aspect of what we’re addressing with Metro is fixed document format, which happens to be tied into (Longhorn’s presentation subystem) Avalon and XAML (Avalon’s XML Applied Markup Language),” said Microsoft lead product manager for Windows, Greg Sullivan. With its huge installed base, “PDF is not going away,” Sullivan continued. “We’re solving a much narrower set of challenges for IHVs (independent hardware vendors) and ISVs (independent software vendors.”
As per the above comments from MS spokespersons, they are not intending to replace PDF. They just want a fixed document format to be used to Longhorn, just like Mac uses PDF. It is the media which is projecting this wrong message , I think MS knows that PDF is so wide spread that a new format cannot replace it.
PDF is great for professional printing. Microsoft doesn’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to supporting pro printing needs. I don’t think PDF is going anywhere. Thousands of companies have deeply invested in the format.
Not that long ago, my mother bought some e-book in some proprietary msft format. She couldn’t open the book, I tried to help.
You wouldn’t believe what an insanely difficult ordeal it turned out to be. You have to get a .net account, so you have to sign up for a hotmail account that you don’t want. Then you get a registration number in a bitmap that you can’t read. Then, even after following the instructions (which are hard to find) it still doesn’t work. You call tech support, they send you through the entire ordeal again – and again.
Is there anybody left on earth who is stupid enough to trust msft with this sort of thing? Sadly, I already know the answer. *Sigh*
is there anyway for an Open PDF format?
~Aaron
> is there anyway for an Open PDF format?
Yes, it has already been available for years, here:
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/index_reference.html
Yeah as if that was interesting to MS.
is there any way you could actually research before you comment?
PDF IS OPEN!!!!
Is there really a need for Micro$oft to create their own portable document format? I mean, really, is there? PDF is already pretty a defacto standard for portable documents, the PDF specification is widely available, so why doesn’t Microsoft just add PDF reader functionality into Windows and add PDF writer functionality to Word? There really is no technical reason why they can’t do it, so why don’t they? Maybe it’s because they can’t play well with others. Maybe it’s because they like to re-invent the wheel (ala stealing Java to create a cheap knockoff called C#). Likely it is because they know they can still get away with monopolistic practices since most of the U.S. Department of Justice are nothing more than a bunch of educated morons tucked away in Bill Gates’ back pocket. Microsoft is simply incapable of adhering to existing standards to support and promote a global computing community. Microsoft’s ultimate goal is to lock all computer user’s into Microsoft’s vision of computing and then use monopolistic practices to bully their users around. In the end, this will be their downfall because no one likes to be bullied and that’s all that Microsoft is: a big, nasty bully.
Examples:
1. State of California still distributes its tax forms in pre-ver-7 pdf’s (read, CANT SAVE CHANGES).
2. Often, on numerous other forms, form fileds (like last name filed) are way shorter than needed. I always have to Use Acrobat Pro (at work) to make changes to form fileds for crap like that.
3. Insert your own example here which involves you working on a poorly designed DPF-based form for which you dont have the source format.
Once again: You do *NOT* need to pay hundreds of dollars for Adobe Acrobat Professional in order to edit PDFs. Uncompress the PDF streams (with the GPLed pdftk, for example), edit the file with VIM or notepad.exe and (optionally) recompress the streams.
It’s really that easy! I cannot understand why you think that Metro will be more easily editable. It will definitely have a strong DRM implementation (since it’s an MS product and DRM is built into the kernels of MS OS’es), so it will – maybe – not be editable at all.
Just in order to use your words: Not PDF “SUXED” all these years, but unreasonable comments to definitely “SUX” these days. One more polite hint especially for you:
http://www.google.com/search?q=edit+pdf