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PDF as open standard: why not?
Posted by Michael Klassen on June 2, 2006 in Soapbox
In my continuing rants about tech (boy, I look like a real grump this week), I read this article which shows Microsoft backing down against Adobe. MS Office, bloatware as long as I can remember, promised a "Save as PDF" feature in their next version. This feature has been running in a beta of Office 2007.
Well, the company that sells every piece of industry standard authoring and graphics tools (now that they've bought all competitors), has forced Microsoft to yank that feature.
So here's a thought. Why can't PDF become an open standard? It's what the company originally intended back in the mid-90s, to create the accepted "portable document format" that crossed all platforms.
There are dozens of PDF creators that you can download for free. They create PDF documents. Is Adobe taking a cut from every PDF document I produce? Probably not.
It's very Web 2.0 of me to ask this of course, but don't standards exist for all of us to use?
Tagged: computing
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