Re: current thoughts on PDF back end

[Sebastien Pierre]

Greg wrote:
>Maybe, but if it ends up being  so then it's only because of the
>marketing clout of basically one company (with support from all their
>board-room friends, of course!  :-).

In fact my girlfriend's father is the CEO of Adobe ;)
... just kidding ;)

>It would be interesting to see if the original inventors of PostScript
>feel that PDFs should have a future or not....

Well, actually both PDF ans PS are from Adobe ; but I don't know the 
actual people ;)

>BTW, there is no reason why PS couldn't be extended to support 
hypertext
>and metadata.  PS' DSC are already a form of metadata.  Hypertext 
links
>could be added to either PS or to the DSC.

Maybe PS offers all that, but it'll only be tweaking. Moreover there 
are some chances that one day Lout will want to add a feature and 
realize they will first have to implement it in PS... so chances are 
that it will never been done.
And regarding metadata, the important is not only to put them in the 
documents, which is quite easy with comments, but also to read 
them....and you cannot put metadata if its presence has not been 
standardized, because no search engine will locate them.

>I would have to question that interpretation of PDF's design 
goals....(ps for printers, pdf for documents)

Actually the very first aim was to produce documents with any soft that 
people could view everywhere. Now Adobe is trying to seduce printing 
people (especially flashers) and graphists, to make PDF the dcument 
format for professional publishing from designi to reproduction. 
Actually one of the most important aspect which are colorimetrics has 
been integrated in PDF quite recently.

Maybe we should try to ask some people who know more about PS and PDF. 
I will try to mail to people who are making BePDF, a PDF viewer for 
BeOS, to know what they think about this cool discussion ; maybe you 
could do the same with PS people (like members of the GS team) ?

Cheers,
Sébastien.