2000.10.05 00:20 "Old-style JPEG and HP 9100C Digital Sender", by Tim Bell

2000.10.06 15:07 "PDF is NOT proprietary!", by Leonard Rosenthol

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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