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2000.10.06 15:07 "PDF is NOT proprietary!", by Leonard Rosenthol
At 8:31 AM -0500 10/6/00, Grissom, Ed wrote:
> As long as that format is not proprietary -- which is what
> Adobe wants (PDF) .
Let's clear something up here....
PDF is NOT proprietary! It is an fully published (and
therefore public) specification. It is NO different than TIFF, where
they published the specification, and maintain the rights to the name
PDF, but allow 3rd parties to do what they want. So just as this
group has extended the Adobe TIFF specification with a number of
features, other folks have done the same with PDF (such as PDF/X-1
from DDAP).
The only big difference between the two is that someone (Sam)
wrote a library for working with the files that everyone has
supported and considers the "standard" implementation of TIFF. As
such, there are LOTS of applications out there that support TIFF.
However, in the PDF world, there are no "standard" libraries - there
are a number of them (different languages (C, Pascal, Perl, etc.),
different features (creation, parsing, etc.)) and there is only one
standard "reader" (Acrobat), though Ghostscript and Xpdf do exist.
Leonard
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