robert engels wrote: > All of this points to exactly what I said. PDF and what it has become is > a VERY POOR standard. The PDF/A is much better.
You both have a point. There are evolutions in PDF that I don't understand, and therefore don't like; for instance: why did they introduce all that XML stuff? There are even people that think AcroForms will be abandoned and replaced by XFA. That would be crazy. I like the AcroForm functionality. I think we mustn't look at the PDF specification as a standard, at most it's a de facto standard for many companies. The real PDF standards are those that are shaped into an ISO standard, such as PDF/X and PDF/A. PDF/A also talks about Tagged PDF which is just what you were asking for: keeping the document structure. These standards are clear and we need more of them. As a matter of fact, more of these ISO standards will surface in the years to come (PDF/E, PDF/UA). Nevertheless I think it's actually a good thing that PDF is getting more and more feature rich. It's a sign that PDF is still alive and kicking. It's not a dying technology. I often compare it with Java: initially Java was a language for making Java applets, but over the years it evolved to a language for serverside applications (J2EE), for small devices (J2ME), and so on... There have been evolutions in Java that turned out to be failures, and Java has been declared dead once in a while, but that doesn't matter: there is still a lot of interesting stuff going on in the Java world. IMO it's important that the basic structure of PDF doesn't change (I have my doubts about stuff like XDP). I'm not afraid of new functionality, even if it means it gets harder and harder to keep an overview: we can always specialize. For instance: we support AcroForms, but only have limited support for XFA. The major problem I see with regard to PDF, is the fact that there are a lot of misconceptions about it. For instance: people buy my book, try the AcroForm examples, and complain that they don't work. Then when I look at what they are trying to do, I see that they still don't understand the difference between an AcroForm and an XFA form (in spite of the fact that it's all explained in the book). An other example: on forums I often read Foxit is better and faster than Adobe Reader. That may be true if you are only interested in reading or printing a PDF, but it isn't true in general... I've read flame wars about this that were completely absurd. People should use the right tool for the right task. That's true for almost anything in life, and it's not a simple problem. Oh boy, never thought I would get that philosophical on New Year's Day ;-) best regards, Bruno ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://itext.ugent.be/itext-in-action/
