Re: [Fsfe-uk] Adobe make Flash scripting Free Software with Mozilla Foundation

[Chris Croughton]

On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 09:43:32AM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 03:25 +0000, Jon Grant wrote:
> 
> > Re PDF, it's never been as portable an experience as they say for me.
> > Many times I get PDFs which render wrong because odd fonts have been
> > used. 
> 
> Depends very much how the PDFs are made. You can do things like
> embedding fonts, but then you get into copyright / patent issues :/

Anything which uses fonts has that problem, it's because the fonts
themselves aren't free (and are big, which affects portability in the
sense of transferring it).  The only way round that is to convert
everything to graphics, but that's also big and is uneditable (I often
use pdf2txt and the like to extract text versions).

> The move to an XML-based PDF format - and one which seems to have some
> level of inspiration from OpenDocument, at least in the container format
> - to me would be a huge step forward. There is a lot of competition in
> this area, too, and Adobe aren't the automatic winners: Microsoft's XML
> Paper Specification is going to be shipping in real software (Office
> 2k7) and real hardware (various printers, for example) very very soon,
> so Adobe are actually behind in technical terms at the moment.

Is it a programming language, like PDF?  PDF's big selling point was
that it is a language in itself which makes it very powerful with a
relatively small emulator, are the XML formats as powerful?

> Since Adobe have a lot to lose, and aren't necessarily in a winning
> position right now, I would think that now is a good time to ensure that
> what they are doing is free software friendly, and guide them down a
> path where in the future they would see the value in making more of
> their products free software.

Or at least making their specifications open and easily available in a
timely manner so that free software isn't always playing catchup.

Chris C