Remember to snag a copy of http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.p... for future reference after the standard vanishes behind ISO's pay policies.

i'm a noob about these things. could you explain what you mean?

ISO (and FDA, etc.) standards tend to not be freely available online. Instead, you pay a few hundred bucks for a copy of the standard, which may be printed, electronic, or both. A sort of cottage industry even sprung up around this -- since the standard itself is copyrighted material, I think other companies are licensing it to resell.

Before the internet, and when the only users of standards were companies too large to care about a few hundred dollars, this made some sense. It's fairly annoying now, but existing businesses depend on this policy, thus they lobby, yadda yadda...

thanks. i remember trying to get a hold of the PCI standard a few years ago. there went my little hardware interface project ;_;

Question: What does this mean for Adobe? Were they earning money by not relinquishing control, or what?

Adobe's been opening the PDF for awhile. Basic specs have been free for all for awhile. Considering the fact that PDF printing is available as a "value-added" feature in both Office and OS X, this is pretty much the next big step for them.

If they don't open up, experience says a new open standard will eat their lunch. Might as well push ahead of the wave (or whatever the proper idiom is).

Or a pseudo-open one -- Microsoft's XPS format has had some push and was submitted to ECMA not too long ago.

am i the only one who never got into PDF because it was a easily seen closed system of being able to read it for free, but to create it cost money? .... I always wished they would just disappear now its seems they are here to stay ;(

If you use the pdf creator software from adobe that may be the case, but that includes DTP software. I've been using pdfcreator ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ ) for years now. Works like adobe's distiller and does the job great.

I'll be more impressed if the pdf format was actually easily editable. http://rants.scribus.net/2006/12/10/pdf-surgery/

...undeniably one of the most commonly _misused_ formats...

PDF is the base of Mac OS X's UI. Is that a misuse?

Quartz's model is compatible, there is even a 1:1 mapping of many PDF concepts to quartz, but it isn't really PDF.

There is a PDF renderer in a higher layer which makes PDF convenient for content, and I there is a "to PDF" capture mechanism to reuse drawing code for PDF generation.

I think Quartz did a look around to see what graphic models were surviving the test of time and chose one rather than inventing their own. Rumor was they wanted to use Display Postscript, but Adobe wanted royalties so they made an API mapped to the concepts of PDF instead.

Interesting. Apple specifically says it's "built on PDF"; in fact, Steve Jobs said so at Macworld San Francisco 2001.

Not only that but NeXT computer's display model was based on PostScript. Apple moved on to PDF once Adobe released the specs.

Can't find any information on PDF being the base for OSX UI, I'd appreciate any links.

"Quartz's feature-rich drawing engine leverages the Portable Document Format (PDF) drawing model and offers Mac OS X applications professional-strength drawing functionality."

http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/quartz/