Document Viewer can not open latest PDF?

Roberto Ragusa mail at robertoragusa.it
Mon Feb 1 09:31:58 UTC 2010


Oliver Ruebenacker wrote:
>   That's interesting. What purpose could be achieved by embedding a
> PDF inside another like this?

That is the Adobe PDF history, as seen by me:

- start with a Postscript-like language avoiding Postscript problems
- good for printing!
- so I can send this pdf to you, you print it, fill the data and fax it to me
- hey, why can't the pdf file include the data, we need a web-like form
- add forms to PDF
- good, but I want to check the data you enter, web pages can do that
- add javascript to PDF
- good, but I want to send you this file too, it is related to my order
- add attachments to PDF
- good, I can have everything in a PDF, but the file is becoming huge
and it is not easy to email/store/copy....
- add splitting support to PDF
- final result: you have some pieces, which are a bad zip-like container,
which contains random stuff, including executable code (Javascript malware...)

At the same time, Unicode support is still a mess (in a format designed
for textual documents!) and features are at war among themselves
(stream rendering for progressive display while downloading vs. append-only
document modifications...).

Now implement this stuff with a big inefficient client...

... and claim you are the state of the art for "electronic paper".

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it


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