Talk:PDF/Archive 2

message: What is the difference between PDF 1.2, PDF 1.3, PDF 1.4, PDF 1.4, PDF/X and PDF/A?--Hhielscher 05:34, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: maybe a section detailing the main differences in each spec might be useful? Or a small articles? --Blade 21:28, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *I agree.  A simple table would suffice highlighting the major features.  Like "layer support", "overlay modes supported", "128-bit encryption", etc. --24.249.108.133 23:39, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Different Versions? 

message: I've frequently heard accusations that PDF was a somehow "unfree" standard, less free than PostScript. Generally, those who say such things cannot point to specifics, so it's purely hearsay. What are the bases of these claims? Are there patents that encumber good quality rendering of PDF files, for instance? David.Monniaux 16:43, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Unfree" standard 

message: Of interest : The 1991 seminal paper from John Warnock about 'Camelot', the Adobe code-name for PDF.
http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/warnock_camelot.pdf
--192.39.145.178 12:57, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: (Note: I moved this to the end of the message, since the convention is to add new items to the end). The Camelot Paper was already referred to in the article (under "Format info"). Notinasnaid 13:41, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Camelot paper 

message: I suggest adding a very nontechnical section for  users like me. Like on what it will do and what might be going wrong if it is not working. Or a link. Thanks. Richard L. Peterson 4/12/06
:Bear in mind this article is about the PDF file format. It isn't about the software that you might be having problems with. Notinasnaid 17:41, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggestion 

message: There has been a link to a site that's specifically geared towards the non technical user, that does offer free help and support, free tools, free membership, has absolutely NO commercial association  with enterprise solution vendors, much less the vendors of overpriced print drivers. However, Notinasnaid, keeps removing it. Aparently he/she/it is on the payroll of one of those commercial sites as they're the only ones that have anything to lose if a site that offers absolutely everything for free is listed in the external links section. Also explains why Notinasnaid has no reference to a real name and has no website or email to identify him/her/it. Makes me wonder; who is wikipedia serving now, the average every day user who really needs the help they can't get anywhere else affordably, or the vendors who only help for a price?
:First, thank you for stopping, after six attempts, adding this link and discussing. That's a good first step. I think you are probably new to editing Wikipedia, so a few points might be useful to reiterate. If removing your link was a mistake I apologise. First, Wikipedia is under attack by commercial spammers who add thousands of links each day in the hope of boosting their Google ratings. This tends to make editors extremely trigger happy in removing external links. Second, if a link is added by someone with no editing history... who has not shown themselves to be an editor who adds reasonable and relevant context, hopefully to a wide variety of articles... then it is especially likely the link will be hit. In such a case it is also extremely likely that the person posting the link is just using Wikipedia to promote their site: under the reasonable (but mistaken) assumption that Wikipedia is a free link farm. Generally you should never add a link to your own site, because it is impossible to be dispassionate about it (as I think your comments above rather show). If a site is notable enough, someone else will add it. Thirdly, Wikipedia does have policies that are relevant here: please read Wikipedia:External_links. Fourthly, this section is supposed to be about "format information" i.e. information about the PDF file format, not PDF tools or utilities.
:Above all, if you are upset that the link is removed, it very strongly suggests you are upset that you cannot use Wikipedia to promote your site, so that is the strongest possible reason to remove it. That's not the only reason. You may indeed be an honest fan of the site.
:Now, before deleting the link I did visit the site. Anyway, here's what I thought about the site when I visited it. Potential to be a good minor PDF portal, one day. Very early days, still full of "our first" articles. Baffling "Best sellers in PDF and eBook publishing" links which make it look like one of the countless sites selling eBooks, but links go nowhere. Very slow news section, only two additions this year.
:I looked at the other two PDF portals listed, PlanetPDF and PDFZone. I know they have both been around over 7 years, and have (at least on occasion) employed journalists to provide copy and keep the news up to date. Both are commercial organisations, but the sites have large amounts of real information. PlanetPDF has around 50 news stories this year. 
:However, there remains a question about whether they are suitable for being external links. PlanetPDF was added with a comment that it has articles about developing with the PDF format; doubless true, somewhere. 
::The developer articles are clearly found on planetPDF: the link is under developer at the top of the page, then the articles are in tips & tricks.  There is also a very useful forum on that site so I think it is a good site to link to. user:Danio
:PDFZone was added with an entirely unsuitable description of being about PDF tools.  Overall, I don't think either really belongs, but as they contain useful stuff I wasn't motivated enough to remove them. 
:What happens now? This may surprise you. We (the editors of this page) try to reach Consensus on what to do. So, comments please. Notinasnaid 08:15, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Generally speaking something doesn't have to be commercial to be considered spam on wikipedia. Nil Einne 08:52, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link removal 

message: Is it possible to add text to a regular PDF File?  If so, how? Jbm867 07:12, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: PDF files are not editable unless you use one of the special PDF editing programs that supposedly decompile PDFs back into a word processing document such as an RTF, Microsoft Word .DOC or Word Perfect .WPD file.  I have never used any of these PDF decompilers — I've simply seen them in stores — so I don't know how well they work. Paul Robinson (Rfc1394) 18:01, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Adobe Acrobat has some very limited tools for this. They add text; but that's all. Don't expect other text to move around to make room. Notinasnaid 20:33, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

text: This is a bit of an oversimplification. Acrobat can edit some aspects of a file, and can edit text line by line. Other tools such as Enfocus Pitstop Professional provide more advanced tools, such as text editing by paragraph. Some applications such as Adobe Illustrator can use PDF as a native format.Elliot100 16:06, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Not just an oversimplification, but false. It is possible to add text to a PDF file with at least two applications, Adobe Acrobat and Nitro PDF. There are probably others. And the Pitstop plugin to Acrobat adds more powerful editing capabilities than Acrobat by itself. Generally it is meaningless to use the term "editable" in respect to a file format. All file formats are editable. The interesting question is what kinds of edits a format makes easy or hard. The design of the PDF format makes editing of text (especially with reflow and layout adjustments) technically more difficult than it is in, say HTML. But it is not impossible by a long shot. The technical difficulty of doing it well is reflected in the expense of the software that does it. Mrhsj 16:21, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Text

message: The cleanup tag was added on December 17, 2005 by Pandion auk but the user failed to explain on this talk page why he added the tag (perhaps too many external links?). Does anyone object to the removal of the tag and if so, why? RedWolf 22:07, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it could be something to do with the way the article is rambling, unstructured, poorly researched, and poorly written. Fix the article before removing the tag, please. If you want specifics about what's wrong, get it peer reviewed. 81.179.178.45 10:21, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

text: I agree with all these points. It's really a very poor article, even though it is full of facts, many of which are relevant but disorganised, but it is missing many relevant facts, and lacking sources. I looked into improving it, and concluded the only way to do it was a complete rewrite that I don't have time for (and which would doubtless be reverted if I tried). Notinasnaid 10:34, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup tag 

message: Wow, this "phoning home" business is a surprise to me. Presumably it depends on the viewing software to decide whether or not to obey the phone-home instructions. I'm glad I don't use Acrobat Reader!
Can some PDF expert confirm that phoning-home is indeed application-dependent, and let us know what viewers actually do phone home?
213.94.242.210 09:42, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What is there to be concerned about? Every web page you visit "phones home" in exactly the same way, and nobody seems to get too excited about that. Notinasnaid 09:43, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, that's the nature of the web; communicating with a web-server is an essential part of the process. But PDF's are typically viewed offline; the last thing you expect them to do is to report behind your back the fact that you've opened a file which is located on your own computer. It's nobody else's business, and it's totally unnecessary. If all Microsoft Office files secretly phoned home to Microsoft Corp. every time they were opened, would privacy advocates get excited? Damn right they would, and rightly so! 213.94.242.210 21:50, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Well, I can't get excited about it, but Adobe seemed to have taken it seriously, hence the latest Adobe Reader prompts before a PDF can submit itself in this way. (7.0.5 I think). Notinasnaid 18:19, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Phoning home

message: *"the inflexibility of PDF rendering makes it difficult to read on screen: it does not adapt to the window size"
That's not true is it?  One thing it DOES do is adapt to the window size.139.133.7.37 13:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Not really. PDF's have a fixed format and page size. All you can really do is zoom in and out. As such they're only look good and are easy to read and navigate on certain sized screens. Alternatively think of making a window that's say 1/4 of your normal screen size. I'm lazy to explain, but think of trying to read a normal pdf on a PDA or mobile phone. Properly designed webpages and other documents without a fixed format however can adjust to the window size. The font size, layour etc can change. Nil Einne 08:46, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: PDF on the Web

message: There is a big mistake at the hystory section. I don't really understand how PDF and DjVu file formats could compete in the "early 1990s" when DjVu was invented in 1996 and I don't think that DjVu "died out". At least, this is what comes out from the text. Maybe the pharagraps should be modified like: Additionally,  during the years, the PDF should compete with other formats like Envoy, Common Ground Digital Paper, DjVu and even Adobe's own PostScript format (.ps). Adobe succesfully supported PDF through its slow multi-year ramp-up.  One policy of the firm was to distribute the Acrobat Reader (now Adobe Reader) program at no cost. Some of the competing formats eventually died out, and PDF became a well-accepted standard.
Èʍ≈59.95.84.143 14:03, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  When exactly "died out" the DjVu format ??? 

message: Could anyone update the page with the latest Searchable Image technology from Adobe?
:"Searchable image exact" is not new (it's been possible since PDF 1.0 and used since Acrobat 3), and is not a type of PDF, so it does not belong in the article. It is an option in Acrobat, that's all. There are many ways to make a PDF, and this is one of them. This common fallacy is covered in commentary on the second external link. Notinasnaid 08:08, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Searchable Image Exact 

message: :PDF is a file format instead of a programming language and for that reason it doesn't need to be interpreted.
Of course it needs to be interpreted: it's not compiled and then executed. I would fix this, but I'm not sure what it's trying to say; any ideas? Marnanel
:I think it's trying to say that the process of handling a PDF is not like the process of handling a PostScript file, which is the execution of a program. Rather, the PDF format contains descriptions: it isn't procedural. Notinasnaid 17:57, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Interpreted 

message: http://createpdf.adobe.com/ seems like a website that provides a useful service.  Maybe it should be included in this article?
: Why? What criterion from Wikipedia:External_Links does it satisfy? Being a "useful service" doesn't appear to be on any list there. Mrhsj 04:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  createpdf.adobe.com 

message: I removed (twice) the following text "On some systems, a PDF file can cause a crash or be inaccessible. In addition, large PDF files can take very long to download off the Internet."
1. This is just vague criticism, and some specific citation is needed from a reliable source (not a blog, for instance) that says this. 2. This uses weasel words which are not suitable for Wikipedia articles; what would "be inaccessible" mean for a file format? What are these "some" systems? 3. Crashes are a matter of software NOT file formats; this confuses the software you are using to view PDF, with PDF the file format. 4. Large files of any kind can take a long time to download; this criticism applies to any large file, not to PDF files specifically. Wikipedia is not a place to vent your understandable frustration, in my opnion. Notinasnaid 10:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Correction: another editor got in ahead of me for the second removal. Notinasnaid 10:12, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: PDF is bulkware, so that's why even 10 page files take too long to load for my taste. You see, I HATE how Wikipedia has to be a smart ass with everything like this. Why can't we accept "common knowledge restricted to certain demographics"? Jessus.. stop with all the "weasel words" already. It's a stupid buzzword/"weasel word" itself, ironically. "Some systems" is WELL ENOUGH for any user in any writing in any report in any document et cetera. --84.249.253.201 00:34, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The size of a PDF depends on how you make it. (That should perhaps go into the article somewhere.) You can easily get a huge file for a 10 page document if the file contains high resolution images of the text. However, you can also slim it down, and if the text is stored as text alone, a PDF file is almost always smaller than a MS Word document of the same quality. Mlewan 06:48, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed criticism