Re: Word attachment...on linuxtoday

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Franck Martin wrote:

> As for PDF, I have heard that the last versions of PDF will contain 
> scripts. I was very disapointed with this decision as it will mean 
> very soon that PDF documents will not be safe from viruses... 

Yes, I believe that is a feature available with Acrobat 5.0, but you 
need to buy Acrobat 5.0 in order to execute the code in the PDF (the no 
cost acrobat reader doesn't execute code).  The free tools such as Xpdf 
or ghostview would also be immune to these sorts of things.

> The drawback of PDF is that you need a proprietary software to convert 
> your document into PDF.

huh?  You can use ghostscript (the pdfwrite backend), gnome-print or 
pdftex, for examples (the first two are free, the last is under a TeX 
style license) .

> I think the FSF and GNU should think about a display/printing format 
> free of any patent and widely published.

As I understand it, the PDF support in ghostscript is based on the 
standards documents.

> I'm not sure if the format of PDF is open. Anyhow the limitation is 
> that you have to acquire an Adobe licence to convert your files to 
> PDF. In the old time in the Unix world many people were using 
> compressed postcript to send documents, but this solution didn't make 
> it to the windows world due to the obligation of buying a postscript 
> viewer. There should be a FREE printer driver on windows and linux 
> that print any document into a compressed format that can be viewed in 
> a FREE reader. 

You can easily gzip compress the postscript output created by almost all 
linux apps.  These can then be viewed with ghostview, and easily printed 
(a large number of printer models support this format natively :).  I 
don't know of a free software postscript printer driver for Windows, but 
it comes with postscript drivers.  I don't really see the point of 
inventing new formats when the existing ones seem sufficient.

> By the way PDF do not understand transparency it seems. 

yes it does.  The latest version supports many blend modes as well.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/