6 ms·

Genuinely curious, what does that mean? Is the PDF standard now open and free, or does Adobe wield any power? Does it own trademarks (for pdf itself, not Acroba

by c7b 6mo ago

Genuinely curious, what does that mean? Is the PDF standard now open and free, or does Adobe wield any power? Does it own trademarks (for pdf itself, not Acrobat Reader or sth like that)?

mkl 6mo ago
It's been open and free on Adobe's website for 20+ years, aside from proprietary extensions like XFA. It's the ISO standards that until recently required payment (as that's how ISO generally works).
marcosdumay 6mo ago
In theory, that means that anybody can create a fully compatible editor/reader, and if Adobe tries to change theirs it will be them that are incompatible. In practice, I don't know why people are talking about PDF. In any recent time, I have only seen people using Adobe readers by accident and haven't heard about anybody using their editor for any reason. I know of some people that buy their editors, just not any that use it.
- kibibu 6mo ago
  My workplace uses it for documents that need digital signatures. Acrobat is an awful piece of software.
- jasomill 6mo ago
  I occasionally use a few obscure Acrobat Pro features, mostly in the preflight tool with a UI that looks as though it hasn't been updated since the Clinton administration. And I occasionally use Acrobat Distiller to convert old PostScript files to PDF, and to embed fonts into old PDF files created without embedded fonts, mostly because I already have it set up to find and embed almost every pre-OpenType outline font ever released by Adobe, Apple, or Microsoft, along with the OpenType fonts in Adobe Font Folio 11.1, and I've never gotten around to setting up all the fonts in Ghostscript. The only Adobe product I use more than once or twice a month at this point is Photoshop, and mostly for things that almost certainly could just as easily be done in any number of other image editors at this point, or even ImageMagick. It's just that I've been using Photoshop since version 2 (not CS2 ca. 2005, Photoshop 2.0 ca. 1991), so it's comfortable.

by c7b 6mo ago

Genuinely curious, what does that mean? Is the PDF standard now open and free, or does Adobe wield any power? Does it own trademarks (for pdf itself, not Acrobat Reader or sth like that)?

mkl 6mo ago

It's been open and free on Adobe's website for 20+ years, aside from proprietary extensions like XFA. It's the ISO standards that until recently required payment (as that's how ISO generally works).

marcosdumay 6mo ago

In theory, that means that anybody can create a fully compatible editor/reader, and if Adobe tries to change theirs it will be them that are incompatible. In practice, I don't know why people are talking about PDF. In any recent time, I have only seen people using Adobe readers by accident and haven't heard about anybody using their editor for any reason. I know of some people that buy their editors, just not any that use it.

kibibu 6mo ago
My workplace uses it for documents that need digital signatures. Acrobat is an awful piece of software.
jasomill 6mo ago
I occasionally use a few obscure Acrobat Pro features, mostly in the preflight tool with a UI that looks as though it hasn't been updated since the Clinton administration. And I occasionally use Acrobat Distiller to convert old PostScript files to PDF, and to embed fonts into old PDF files created without embedded fonts, mostly because I already have it set up to find and embed almost every pre-OpenType outline font ever released by Adobe, Apple, or Microsoft, along with the OpenType fonts in Adobe Font Folio 11.1, and I've never gotten around to setting up all the fonts in Ghostscript. The only Adobe product I use more than once or twice a month at this point is Photoshop, and mostly for things that almost certainly could just as easily be done in any number of other image editors at this point, or even ImageMagick. It's just that I've been using Photoshop since version 2 (not CS2 ca. 2005, Photoshop 2.0 ca. 1991), so it's comfortable.