I fully applaud your work on promoting the fact that there exist Open versions of PDF, as produced by the ISO. It would be nice, however, if you provided links and/or names for these - ISO 32000 (PDF), ISO 19005 (PDF/A), ISO 24517 (PDF/E) and ISO 15930 (PDF/X).
In addition, I welcome your promoting the existence of the various free PDF readers that are available to users on various OS platforms.
However, I noticed that you've chosen to leave visibly absent the lack of overlap between these two things. It is EXTREMELY important for users to know that while these free readers exist - NONE of them support ANY of the Open versions of PDF.
While the FSF is working on their GnuPDF project, to provide an ISO 32000 compliant viewer - it will be a while before that materializes. In that time, I would think that users of free products would want/expect their products to comply with open standards. As such, I think that an excellent use for yourselves and your site would be to work with to promote that effort.
I, myself, am quite active in that effort and in free/open PDF efforts. I have been an active participant on every major free/open PDF-related project for over 10 years now! I will continue to help work with these projects to help them achieve this goal - and would love all the help you can offer...
Leonard
Hi Leonard,
Am Montag, 2. Februar 2009 18:25:34 schrieb Leonard Rosenthol:
I fully applaud your work on promoting the fact that there exist Open versions of PDF, as produced by the ISO. It would be nice, however, if you provided links and/or names for these - ISO 32000 (PDF), ISO 19005 (PDF/A), ISO 24517 (PDF/E) and ISO 15930 (PDF/X).
We are working on a page that has more information concerning the different PDF-Standards and Versions. It will be referred to instead of the fsfe-open- standards-page.
In addition, I welcome your promoting the existence of the various free PDF readers that are available to users on various OS platforms.
However, I noticed that you've chosen to leave visibly absent the lack of overlap between these two things. It is EXTREMELY important for users to know that while these free readers exist - NONE of them support ANY of the Open versions of PDF.
I, personally cannot verify that all of PDF-Readers are fully standards- compliant; what is important, is that they are Free Software, so that anyone interested can *make* them comply to standards (if those standards are open standards).
While the FSF is working on their GnuPDF project, to provide an ISO 32000 compliant viewer - it will be a while before that materializes. In that time, I would think that users of free products would want/expect their products to comply with open standards. As such, I think that an excellent use for yourselves and your site would be to work with to promote that effort.
I, myself, am quite active in that effort and in free/open PDF efforts. I have been an active participant on every major free/open PDF-related project for over 10 years now! I will continue to help work with these projects to help them achieve this goal - and would love all the help you can offer...
I understand your goals and think that it is important to work on standard- compliance within the software projects. However it is beyond the scope of our compaign. Please understand that PDF-Readers is not targeted at developers (and we are not developers ourselves or at least not involved in PDF-Reader- development), but at regular users. We want to show that - contrary to what most sites on the net claim - it is not neccessary use Adobe's PDF-Reader to view PDF files. At the same time we want to inform about Open Standards and Software Freedom, which is closely related to the topic.
If you have worked with different Free Software Projects, you will probably know better how to help them improve in the areas you mentioned.
Regards, Hannes Hauswedell
Unfortunately, the lack of standards support in the free readers that you have listed mean that you can NOT use those products to "view PDF files" - at least not every possible PDF document and/or not correctly.
I can point you to numerous PDF that are posted on public web sites that will not display correctly in those readers :(. That's a problem that needs to be solved before recommending such products to end users. And it's not PDFs that are being created by commercial solution - open/free PDF creation tools such as OpenOffice, pdfTeX, Scribus, etc. all are capable of creating PDF documents that will display incorrectly (or not at all) in the tools you have listed.
Leonard
On 2/3/09 12:15 PM, "Hannes Hauswedell" hannes@fsfe.org wrote: We want to show that - contrary to what most sites on the net claim - it is not neccessary use Adobe's PDF-Reader to view PDF files. At the same time we want to inform about Open Standards and Software Freedom, which is closely related to the topic.
If you have worked with different Free Software Projects, you will probably know better how to help them improve in the areas you mentioned.
Regards, Hannes Hauswedell
-- Leonard Rosenthol PDF Standards Architect Adobe Systems Incorporated
Hi all,
* Leonard Rosenthol lrosenth@adobe.com [2009-02-03 04:31:42 -0800]:
Unfortunately, the lack of standards support in the free readers that you have listed mean that you can NOT use those products to "view PDF files" - at least not every possible PDF document and/or not correctly.
I can point you to numerous PDF that are posted on public web sites that will not display correctly in those readers :(. That's a problem that needs to be solved before recommending such products to end users. And it's not PDFs that are being created by commercial solution - open/free PDF creation tools such as OpenOffice, pdfTeX, Scribus, etc. all are capable of creating PDF documents that will display incorrectly (or not at all) in the tools you have listed.
I have forwarded it to Georg, too.
<mk spontaneous mode> I think Adobe should offer a Free Software reference implementation. And Adobe should not offer non-free software to end users, that's unethical ;) </mk spontaneous mode>
Best wishes, Matthias
Am Dienstag, 3. Februar 2009 20:50:18 schrieb Matthias Kirschner:
Hi all,
- Leonard Rosenthol lrosenth@adobe.com [2009-02-03 04:31:42 -0800]:
Unfortunately, the lack of standards support in the free readers that you have listed mean that you can NOT use those products to "view PDF files" - at least not every possible PDF document and/or not correctly.
I can point you to numerous PDF that are posted on public web sites that will not display correctly in those readers :(. That's a problem that needs to be solved before recommending such products to end users. And it's not PDFs that are being created by commercial solution - open/free PDF creation tools such as OpenOffice, pdfTeX, Scribus, etc. all are capable of creating PDF documents that will display incorrectly (or not at all) in the tools you have listed.
I have forwarded it to Georg, too.
<mk spontaneous mode> I think Adobe should offer a Free Software reference implementation. And Adobe should not offer non-free software to end users, that's unethical ;) </mk spontaneous mode>
I'll send my proposal for an answer over the list later.
I think, that in the end, I should answer him, since I wrote the first answer as well.
- Hannes
Best wishes, Matthias
Hi Hannes,
I have forwarded the message from Adobe to Georg. He will also look through it.
Best wishes, Matthias