Challenges Ahead for Adobe's Portable Document Format
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Volume 21, Number 2 - April 2005 through June 2005 Challenges Ahead for Adobe’s Portable Document Format By Dr. Paul Cesarini and Mr. Jason Mellen Peer-Refereed Article KEYWORD SEARCH Computer Technology Graphic Communications Information Technology Internet Philosophy Visual Communications The Official Electronic Publication of the National Association of Industrial Technology • www.nait.org © 2005 Journal of Industrial Technology • Volume 21, Number 2 • April 2005 through June 2005 • www.nait.org Challenges Ahead for Adobe’s Portable Document Format By Dr. Paul Cesarini and Mr. Jason Mellen Introduction: that it will become the mainstream the Promise of PDF technology for electronic communi- Dr. Paul Cesarini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Communication & Technol- Universal document exchange, that cations, document distribution, and ogy Education (VC&TE) at Bowling Green State elusive goal only slightly less far- printing / publishing workflow.” (p. 61) University. His current research and work focuses on digital rights management and the on-going fetched than the paperless office, has While the author agrees with his overall erosion of fair use for audio, video, and text. Prior largely become a reality over the past premise that the PDF is robust, mature to teaching in VC&TE, Paul created and managed the BGSU Student Technology Center, Laptop Loan few years. Adobe’s Acrobat line of technology with great potential, it may Program, and annual Technology Fair. He reads not be quite so clear-cut. Wired far too much. products, recently released in their 7.0 incarnation, have steadily improved and have achieved a near-ubiquity in a va- Despite overall gains in ease-of-use and riety of industries and disciplines. The a broad user base, the PDF now faces a publishing industry continues to rely series of hurdles and roadblocks toward on Acrobat for all things print. Web its very universality. These include the content developers and technical com- potential for malicious code to be in- municators rely on it for convenient troduced into PDFs, increased usability and efficient ways to make manuals concerns associated with PDF-based and related documentation accessible to content online, the continued lack of end-users. Adobe has recently begun standardization in the electronic book pushing Acrobat as an essential tool for (eBook) industry, overall readability on enterprise, as well, by promoting it as computer screens or web browsers, and a foundational tool for accessing and stiffened competition from several key sharing corporate data. players in different industries, includ- Jason Mellen is a student of Visual Communication ing Microsoft, Macromedia, Palm, and Technology and a Digital Media Technologist with Autodesk. Bowling Green State University's Digital Media Re- Creating a portable document format search Group. Jason's research and work focuses (PDF) file in many cases has now be- on the areas of digital media, e-Learning, and An Open Specification, computer-aided collaboration. He also serves as come as easy as printing, and often in- the resident advisor to IMPACT, a living-learning volves little more than a single mouse- a Broad Base community focused on the integration of moral How has the PDF managed to become principles and critical thinking. click. This is a far cry from earlier versions of Acrobat that often involved so widely used in such a relatively short complicated distillation processes and period of time? The PDF is barely over intermediary file formats to get from a decade old, yet its reach is both far the original to a PDF. Adobe has also and wide. The open licensing stance made it increasingly easy to transfer a taken by Adobe has a great deal to do PDF file to a Palm OS or PocketPC- with the success of the format. Adobe based device, which further enhances does not charge a fee for their PDF the portability and appeal of the format. format. Adobe has often stated that “the PDF is available to anyone who This increased ease of PDF creation, wants to develop tools to create, view, and corresponding overall popularity of or manipulate PDF documents,” and the PDF format itself, has not gone un- has gone so far as to openly publish the noticed. In Portable Document Format PDF specification, in order to encour- (PDF) – Finally, a Universal Document age development of third-party PDF Exchange Technology, author Wan-Lee solutions. The following legal notice Cheng espoused the likelihood of long- from Adobe’s Developer Solutions site term sustainability and growth in popu- relates to this openness: larity of PDF. He states that, “Although PDF is still growing, there is no doubt 2 Journal of Industrial Technology • Volume 21, Number 2 • April 2005 through June 2005 • www.nait.org Adobe desires to promote the use of on Windows-based platforms, and in XML has certain advantages over other PDF for information interchange all likelihood Microsoft will never opt binary data formats. For one, XML files among diverse products and ap- to incorporate this feature, Adobe has are human readable in that the content plications. Accordingly, [seven] . compensated for this by releasing a is understandable in its raw format . patents are licensed on a royalty- barebones version of Acrobat exclusive without special machine formatting. free, non-exclusive basis for the to Windows, called Acrobat Elements. Additionally, because every XML term of each patent and for the sole For about $50, Acrobat Elements document conforms to a given struc- purpose of developing software that provides a minimalist feature set that ture, the data can be exchanged and produces, consumes, and interprets effectively gives Windows PDF feature validated using generic XML parsers PDF files that are compliant with parity with Mac OS X. Adobe touts and exchange systems (such as XML- the Specification (Adobe, 2003) this basic level of PDF functionality as RPC). (DuChame, 1999) The open being a way for businesses to “extend nature of XML data makes it easy to These actions have allowed the PDF the value of their Microsoft Office share single data sets among different to flourish in Open Source Software investment by standardizing on Adobe applications. An example would be a (OSS) products such as the free Ope- Portable Document Format (PDF) for meeting agenda for an enterprise corpo- nOffice.org suite, which allows for on- reliable document distribution.” (Ado- ration that contains XML information the-fly PDF and Flash conversion with be, 2004) Third-party companies have about both attendees and the meeting any documents generated by its word also made in-roads here, as well. Com- itself. A calendaring program would processing, spreadsheet, presentations, panies such as Xelerate, Data Becker, interpret the relevant XML in order to or web-authoring components. Scansoft, and others have released add the meeting to a user’s calendar. inexpensive software for Windows that Meanwhile, a user’s contact manager OpenOffice.org Community Manager allow basic PDF creation. The open would parse information about the at- Louis Suarez-Potts clarified this license source community has also stepped-up tendees and add that information to an somewhat. According to Suarez-Potts, in this area, by developing free PDF address book. while not necessarily an open standard, generators like PDFCreator. which often implies a peer review pro- Given the powerful nature of XML, cess, and certainly not open source, PDF The Strength of XML Adobe’s adoption of this data format is indeed an open specification. (Louis Recently, Adobe has taken steps to will likely push the PDF format in new Suarez-Potts, personal communication, achieve a new level of openness with directions and take the platform into January 14, 2004) Adobe spokesperson the integration of the Extensible uncharted waters. Adobe’s XDP files John Cristofano further added to this Markup Language (XML) data format will use XML to represent four types of idea in Mozilla Magazine. He stated into their PDF platform. A new meta- information: form templates, form data, that “PDF is a published specification format called XDP (XML Data Pack- configuration information, and other - meaning it is publicly available for age) combines traditional PDF files information such as digital signatures anyone to acquire; anyone who acquires with XML markup that can contain and meta-data as well as the traditional the specification has the capability to both information from the document PDF data. Form templates provide the create programs that read and/or write and information about the document. technical descriptions and field-map- PDF files.” (Angelo, 2003, p.2) (Adobe, 2003b) XML is a multi-pur- pings used when linking XML data pose file format for the representation to form fields in the PDF documents. This openness and broadly-installed of “data objects.” To understand XML, The form data is the actual vocabular- existing user base were likely deciding it is perhaps helpful to first think of ies (like ACORD) that are used in the factors behind Steve Jobs’ decision to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML); document’s embedded form fields. The base the 2D rendering library of Quartz, the language of the web. HTML “tags” XML configuration data is responsible the primary imaging model of Mac OS are used to indicate various styles and for various databases and SOAP con- X, on Adobe’s PDF format. As a result, attributes within a document. However, nections for that document. SOAP is a PDF is the default file format of Mac HTML contains a limited vocabulary protocol used for exchanging informa- OS X, and anti-aliased text and graph- that is understood by web browsers tion with web service applications. ics within Mac OS X is significantly for displaying documents. XML, in improved from previous versions of contrast, has no specified vocabulary. The ability to have information con- the Mac OS.