Hi Stefan,
Thank you very much for your input. We have in fact started work on a page that will explain the various versions of PDF and how they relate to Open Standards. It will take some time to put together but we would appreciate any comments you might have once it has been published.
all the best, /Stian
From Stefan Champailler, 2009-02-24:
Dear Sir,
I've been looking at the website http://pdfreaders.org/ with attention and I find it a bit disappointing. Although it's important to explain people that there exists free-software alternative to Adobe's stuff, I think it'd be better to explain clearly what the differences there are between the various << standards >> in existence.
If I care to write you about this right now is because I work for a company which provides a *huge* quantity of services to the Belgian governement. As you know Belgium is somewhat pioneering the electronic identity card and, to say the least, the eID is quite pushed here. Fedict (the IT arm of the Belgian government) is actually pushing for it everywhere. Now, my current customer seems to be seduced by the eID (he aint' an IT guy, I think he's not quite interested in the social aspect of eID which the FSF (and many other) are criticizing).
Where it gets interesting is that they now want to use the eID to sign some documents they use in their offices and partners. An they've asked me (well my company :-)) to think about it. An dhere comes the PDF. In our case, the PDF representation is pretty interesting :
- Acrobat reader is widely available
- Acrobat reader allows signature
- it is pretty simple to use
- it's very stable
- PDF's format is open enough for us to generate PDF document with open
source software (no free soft, too bad)
but... but there's a but. As you probably know, PDF can be signed only if there were produced by Adobe's tool. So from the point of view of business process IT-fication, I must say that this is an ultra-nasty trap. It's very hard to rival with PDF in the real life (PDF is a proven format). So I think it'd be very nice of you to explain that trap because it means a lot for business processes.
And to finish with, it's important to realize that although the governemtn is << late >> with new technologies, it's actually quite ahead of the public and I'm afraid that if PDF signature "a la Adobe" gain ground in the national institutions, it will become a de facto standard for the people...
Please don't publish my mail, I've already been spotted by my boss...
Regards,
Stefan