On Mon, 17 Mar 1997, Brian Kelly wrote:
> From reading a number of articles in Ariadne and postings to this list
> it seems that Acrobat is growing in popularity, as it is available today
> and there are a variety of tools available. However I think it's clear
> that the SGML / richer HTML / stylesheet alternative is rapidly developing
> and will have major benefits, not the least being its openness (Acrobat
> is owned by Adobe. Would we be advocating a proprietary solution for
> eLib projects if it was owned by Microsoft? What will we do if
> Microsoft ever bought Adobe? Or if Adobe introduced charging for
> software to read Acrobat file - remember what happened to GIF).
I was going to write something defending Adobe, pointing out that our
collective experiences with PostScript has been relatively good compared
to our collective experiences with Microsoft formats. PostScript seems to
be far more open than, say, RTF or GDI are. The reason I say "was going
to write" is that it suddenly struck me that Adobe are appearing to "do a
Microsoft" with _some_ bits of Acrobat; the detailed spec for encryption
for example doesn't appear to be freely available (despite the fact that
Adobe have been upfront with the rest of the PDF spec) and the freeware
authors that have implemented PDF tools have had short shrift from Adobe.
I also vaguely remember some hoohah in the dim distant past about Adobe
not being too happy with clone PostScript interpreters but I can't
remember why they changed their minds (was it litigation, a change
of heart or am I just dreaming the whole thing?).
Tatty bye,
Jim'll
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
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