Most of you already know this, but just in case:
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle
or Paperback
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or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
H ere is another one:
http://www.primopdf.com/
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)…