You may have read my below Microsoft XPS post talking about Microsoft’s planned killer for PDF, now I have even more news to add to the complexity. On Jan 29, 2007 Adobe released the full 1.7 PDF document format to AIIM as an open standard, read more here (http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS7542722606.html). One could speculate forever as to the reasons why. Is it retaliation for XPS and Office 2007? What will Microsoft do? As we have seen in the area of open source and commercial products they really can coexist and at times seem to support each other. Is Adobe planning something new? Or does it simply show their focus of building the Adobe LiveCycle products and other business focused applications. Some may be aware that Adobe has a business around the PDF format that allows developers to integrate into their own application. What becomes of Adobe’s Scan Libraries? This poses an interesting question and forces sellers of toolkits to create a business case around Software Development Toolkits vs. design from scratch applications. Usually this conversation always leads to Toolkits make a lot of sense. This is a good time to discuss!
- Chris Riley, Artsyl Technologies, Inc.
Please see my comment here:
http://gilbane.com/publishing_blog/Thad_McIlroy.html
Posted by: Thad | February 08, 2007 at 09:28 AM
XPS is not a PDF killer. Adobe will combat XPS by either supporting ODF, shipping tools for Adobe "Mars" - an XML representation of PDF - or perhaps helping fix OOXML. Further comments on my blog - http://michaelejahn.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Michael Jahn | February 08, 2007 at 10:01 PM
A couple of good articles on new PDF A standard:
http://www.scanguru.com/download.php?list.5
Posted by: Steve | February 09, 2007 at 06:52 PM