Preserved Topic: Open source alternative to PDF?

Is there one? Do we need one?

I had a nose around and found some discussion:
http://www.shouldexist.org/story/2001/8/22/53234/3733

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Emps

The Emperor dot org

I don't realy see a real need PDF is open enough and several low cost and open source solutions exist. Besides any open source format would have to be stickly maintained and supported or it would end convoluted and unsupported by the major software vendors making it useless.

Take PNG for example. Far better then GIF and in many cases JPG. But it's support is not much more then and after though by most comercial software vendors, which makes it a too much a risk for comercial and mission critical sites. SVG and X3D are equally interesting formats that seem to be going no where fast. Oh sure Adobe is trying to push SVG and I personally would love to use it. But browser support is just not forth comming and I just don't see it's usefulness for the immediate future, expecially now that the whole browerer market kind of fizzled. What we need someone to implement the next genaration browser XML based, with an openGL based 3D rendering via X3D, vector support using SVG, and raster image using JPG 2000 and PNG.

I am all for open source as an idea. I don't realy see it as much more then a passing fad, nice until the question of money and realy life comes up. So may useful project fail, are slow to develope, and are poorly supported all simply do to the lack of money. I often wonder how long Apache and PHP etc will exist are we building a infrastructure that will eventually fail becase no one is willing to pay for anything at which times goverments will need to pickup the slack.

I would be interested to know how many US companies allow open source software on there systems, the companies I have worked for have not allowed it. I always had to purchase comercial solutions. My guess is they perfered to have someone they could go after if needed.

J. Stuart J.

[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 11-19-2003).]

Ernie Ball uses open source, but yeah, I have the same underlying fears.

As far as PDF and DOC go, the issue from the first of that article is readability and they both have free readers available.

EDIT: found this interesting and somewhat relevant =D

Jason

[This message has been edited by JKMabry (edited 11-19-2003).]