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« The Joy of Swearing | Main | Pretty new science news: asteroid named, chick born »
Exporting to PDF
Category: Linux • OpenSource
Posted on: May 12, 2009 9:57 PM, by Greg Laden
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Comments
PDF, the format is not proprietary. It is a standard format with an open definition such that any proprietary software manufacturer can build their own viewer or editor. In fact in the printing industry there are some strict standards for compliance quite independently of Adobe. PDF is effectively the modern PostScript.
Posted by: John S. Wilkins | May 12, 2009 11:26 PM
It kind of raises the question of what "proprietary" means. I think Adobe controls the format. In the past the format was not entirely open or transparent, but perhaps it is now. If it is totally open then it is indeed the PS of today and I think that may well be the case, but it is not "opensource" in the sense that there is a community that can directly influence how it works or what it looks like.
I tend to agree that the format is not proprietary in any classic sense, even if a company controls the internals.
Posted by: Greg Laden | May 12, 2009 11:54 PM
ISO 32000-1:2008 -- all details available, and Adobe has provided a blanket patent license for necessary technology.
In theory, the ISO maintenance group (dunno offhand which that is, but I could look it up) could take the standard and do pretty much whatever with it -- but Adobe is playing nice so there's not much interest.
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | May 13, 2009 12:15 AM
I find one gets better results by printing to file and selecting to print directly to PDF (if that option is highlighted) or printing to PS and then using ps2pdf.
Sometimes it seems like OO is trying to optimize the PDF in the export and you get artifacts (ie, extra spacing between characters). The printing to PS/PDF (an option of the OS) seems to get around this.
YMMV
Posted by: ByteReader | May 13, 2009 12:34 AM
For those of us stuck with Windows products, there is
pdfcreator:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
which allows you to print anything you can print to a pdf file.
Posted by: A | May 13, 2009 2:23 AM
H ere is another one:
http://www.primopdf.com/
Posted by: toby | May 13, 2009 10:57 AM
RE: Proprietary Format:
PDF was created by Adobe, and was a Proprietary format, until it was released to an open standard in mid-2008. (Although prior to this date, Adobe allowed for use of it's format royalty free in general)
Also - PDF and PostScript are fairly different. PostScript is actually a programming language (well page description language) - it requires devices to have an interpreter (RIP) to execute the PostScript to draw an image. PDF is a raw format. PDF uses most of what PostScript is, but has already been 'complied' (not the right term, but close enough)by RIP, require less system resources to draw/print. So in essence, yeah, PDF is just a modern PostScript (I convinced myself by writing this)...
Posted by: jj | May 13, 2009 6:55 PM