Adobe wants PDF as a standard
The PDF, or Portable Document File developed by Adobe Systems to represent documents with graphics and fonts in a simple digital format, could soon join the programming language BASIC and the audio format MP3 as specifications maintained by the International Organization for Standards. “PDF is so ubiquitous, so many people rely upon it or know it, that there is no longer the issue of educating them what PDF is. It’s more a situation of tapping international brainpower to innovate on PDF, and make it ever better than we could make it ourselves,” said Sarah Rosenbaum, director of product management at Adobe.
The San Jose software company estimates more than 20 million PDF files are on the Web, and it has distributed more than 500 million copies of Adobe Reader, the software that displays PDFs. Adobe made the PDF specification public upon its release in 1993. Releasing it to the International Organization for Standards means a loss of company control over the specification, but becoming an official standard may help fend off competition from XPS, a rival format that Microsoft shipped with its Windows Vista operating system. While this news won’t probably affect common users too much, it will help PDF to reach even higher share on the internet. Too bad this Adobe Reader is so heavy, slow loading and resource wasting application…
Source: Mercury News
Comments(6)
Theres alternative pdf readers out there though, like Foxit Reader which is extremely fast and light compared to Abode Reader.
Get foxit pdf reader. It does the same as acrobat reader, but it opens instantly…
Google it for the link…
There are lots of free readers, writers etc. After all the spec has been open from day one.
The real issue is whether the reader you get does what you want it to, since not all of them implement all the features.
I find that Adobe Acrobat is faster than just the reader.
maybe if pdf files werent bloated bastards of things normally hosted on bloated poorly developed sites that run slower than a wet week pdfs would be good.
me i hate them and i hate people who only want to use them for security – if i really wanted to edit your data a pdf wont stop many people.
Adobe FTW !