surrounded by reality

	Friday, October 18, 2002

[via Scripting News]: Adobe is working on making Acrobat a more versatile format. This is good; a fair number of the Acrobat documents I get have no real need to be locked to prevent modification; they're just distributed as Acrobat files to make it easier to distribute a nice, easily printable format. However, they are inevitably locked up tightly from any modification, making getting information back out a royal pain.

The article, Acrobat no longer a "roach motel" , doesn't say very much about how open they'll make the format. I hope they push for an option to make your documents capable of at least graceful degradation from Postscript into an XML representation of the formatted text. Even better would be if there was a way for tools to include hints in the Acrobat file that would let you do a two-way trip (for example, an option to embed word processor style names in the Acrobat file format as hints to an import program).

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