Oh how I hate PDF :-(
It's still useful, but it's being perverted as a "read only"
no-fair-use medium for DRM purposes, on Windows anyways. It's
misused a lot too.
I paid good money (> $300) for a licensed copy of the full Acrobat for
Windows a number of years back, specifically to be able to archive
vintage manuals, magazines, and docs to the PDF format. Which I
presumed at the time to be open, and to stay open. At least my
expensive licensed copy of Acrobat is of an early enough version that
it'll presumably always produce PDF files that are readable on the new
readers.
It's probably time to freeze the PDF format and refuse to let in DRM
hooks and whizz-woo features. Isn't the file format documented enough
that the format is 'freed' of Adobe's menace?
Personally, I'm not among the "I hate PDF's" crowd. I first
purchased a copy of Acrobat to create my own PDF's 9.5 years ago, and
have upgraded a couple times since that time. I'm now running
Acrobat 6.0 Professional, and while I'm not fond of DRM in all of
it's aspects, I do like the fact that I lock down a PDF. I recently
wanted to send something to someone relating to a non-computer
related project I'm working on, and due to what it is, I don't want
anyone being able to modify the file, but I don't mind them printing
it out, I was able to do this with PDF.
Another big advantage for me is that the file was created with an
application that is 10+ years old, and very few people can read the
format, while almost anyone can read the PDF. One thing I find very
handy is that applications such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop
can now open PDF's. If the PDF contains vector graphics, you can
edit them with Illustrator. This is the first good method I've found
for moving a lot of my data to something modern.
It's interesting to note that a site that sells DRM'd PDF's of old
RPG books for a lot of major companies has started offering
"watermarked" PDF's that can be copied anywhere rather than the DRM'd
ones that can only be used on one computer.
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
|
http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
