Leonard Rosenthol wrote: > People have done some AMAZING things with PDF in terms of interactive > catalogues & brochures. There are also excellent eLearning-type > solutions out there based entirely on interactive PDFs.
Yep, that's what I mean. If you look at technologies such as PDF, Java, or even iText, you see that people are doing stuff with it that was never the original intention when the technology was first invented. That's not a disadvantage; it's fascinating! > Everything is documented and published - and has been since version > 1.0. Two problems: - Most of the people don't read the specs, manuals,... We see that all the time with iText. - Some parts of the PDF Reference are very hard to read and understand. It's easy to lose the overview. > But how do you innovate otherwise?? That's what I meant with my previous post: I like the fact that new functionality opens new perspectives. Of course: there will be paths that result in a dead end, but that's not a good reason to stop innovation. > the same design flexibility that makes it possible for > Acrobat 2.0 to open up a PDF created by Acrobat 8! That's 6 versions > and over 10 years of innovation...YET, the design works! How is this > possible? Because the viewer simply "ignores" stuff it doesn't know > about - BY DESIGN! That's what I meant when I said: "it's important that the basic structure of PDF doesn't changed"; I don't always use the right words: where it says structure, I also meant design. > The reasons should be obvious and take us back to the > above discussion of where technologies such as Apollo fit in. The acquisition of MacroMedia, and the new tools and specs that are now emerging, are indeed a good evolution. It's more clear if you can say to end users: PDF is for this, Flex is for that; whereas specialists know how it all fits together. > PDF is a very rich standard, and as such may not be completely suitable > for certain specific uses. That's the whole reason that the ISO PDF > committees were formed - to create subsets of PDF that focused on > specific verticals such as print, archiving, engineering (PDF/E), etc. The same message in other words ;-) > Please don't generalize! That's true in general. Oops, that's a generalization too ;-) 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/
