A History of Concerns about PDF PDF Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Agenda1. From humble beginnings2. Start of widespread adoption3. Finding strengths4. Growing pains5. PDF in the world today6. What does the future hold?

A bit about me

CTO at Datalogics Worked with PDF for over 15 years Board member of PDF Association Active participant in the PDF

standards community

From humble beginnings Lessons learned from PostScript applied to a new format

Optimized from the start for precise, portable visual representation

Targeted towards business audiences in primary messaging

From humble beginningsValue proposition not easily understood at the time

Raster images are generally accepted as archival and preserving of visual fidelity

Concept of repurposing information in presentation format documents not widely desired at the time

Large existing investments in print workflow Investment in machinery, software, expertise and

mindshare Positive differentiation from PostScript was not clear

to start

From humble beginningsTypical complaints at the birth

It’s just another PostScript! Why do we need another image format? I can’t edit it in a text editor?!? I have to pay just to view PDF?!?

Value of features drives adoption

Encryption and security A mechanism to “softly” restrict document usage A mechanism to solidly restrict opening a PDF

Character system support MBCS support for CJK languages Unicode equivalency for any font glyph

Color space and compression support Open, published standard

Freely implementable, with restrictions Living standard with frequent updates

Start of widespread adoption

Start of widespread adoptionFeatures of Adobe Reader & Acrobat Drive Adoption Price of editing falls from initial $2495 Price of viewing becomes free Plugin architecture for Acrobat and Reader enables an

ecosystem to start Plugins for PDF creation with common programs Plugins for PDF viewing within web browsers

Finding strengthsBy adopting to community needs, PDF comes into its own Graphic arts and prepress users Business users Archiving and reliable cross-boundary interchange Representation of information with visual reliability

Finding strengthsTypical complaints as PDF becomes popular

Why is support for non-Latin text so poor? We buy software too!

How does good visual layout help the blind?

Why can’t I leverage my existing print investment more effectively?

How come there aren’t many vendors for PDF tools?

Growing painsAs PDF became more broadly adopted, grumbling emerges

Specification ambiguity and interpretation differences Frequency of updates and extensions Issue with web browser components Specification ownership

Growing painsPDF offers amazing flexibility – too much flexibility?

Image – only PDFs undermine credibility of PDF as repurposeable

Ability to make environment – specific PDFs gets abused, perceived reliability suffers

Permissiveness of Acrobat and Reader lead to PDFs that are not interoperable with other tools

Publication of specification concurrent with Acrobat and reader updates led to other implementations always being behind

Growing painsPDF tries to become everything to everybody:

XML becomes trendy, PDF gets jealous: Mars – XML to express PDF syntax in a different way XFA – XML for a second, incompatible forms syntax

Flash becomes trendy, PDF gets jealous Portfolios require a Flash interpreter to process

Web browsers are trendy, PDF wants in: Hyperlinks to external files, executable JavaScript bring huge

security problems Monetization of content is trendy, PDF wants in:

Yahoo! AdSense integration – targeted ads for PDFs program by Adobe

Growing painsMixed messaging about PDF’s strengths:

PDFs aren’t just “frozen documents” But actual editors are very scarce

PDFs are great for eBooks But reading PDFs on small screens is tremendously painful

PDFs are great for long-term preservation But new standards keep emerging and old standards keep

changing

PDFs are reliable But behavior not necessarily reliable across devices

Typical complaints of the era:

If Adobe owns PDF, can’t they change the terms at any time?

Why are PDFs vectors for viruses?

Toom many features only work in certain viewers!

Why are PDF viewers so error-prone?!?

Growing pains

HTML was going through some of the same issues:

Differences in viewing and processing between browsers

Syntactically incorrect HTML written by popular tools

Plugin architectures of browsers help expand the reach of HTML

Also trying to be everything to everyone

But – HTML community refocused on what it is good at, and left the other things to others

Elsewhere in the world during this time

PDF in the world todayPDF is an important part of today’s world: Formal documents that need to be seen reliably by

others Documents that need to be archived or preserved Increasing use in automated electronic data

interchange Standard for print and where visual appearance is key

PDF in the world todayPDF is a community effort today:

Adobe gifted the PDF standard to ISO in 2008 Opened up participation to all interested parties,

Adobe continues to play an important part Explicit patent license a key enabler for other

implementations International community continues working to refine

PDF to be more useful and standardized in PDF 2.0 Best practices spread in the PDF community through

organizations such as the PDF Association

Comparisons to other formats are inevitable

Seen as heavy-weight and inconvenient vs other formats

Seen as final format, uneditable, frozen Many recommendations to scan and OCR to bring

content “back to life” for editing

Very complicated vs. HTML and other formats Can’t edit or even inspect without specialized tools

PDF in the world today

PDF in the world todayThe past means that solved problems still linger:

PDFs are just enhanced rasters: the flexibility to make bad documents means PDF gets the blame for bad software

PDFs are insecure: security in applications is better, but format still allows for insecurity

PDFs are unreliable across platforms: best practices for viewers are clearer, but outliers mean PDF gets tagged as unreliable

Since the inception of PDF, support has become widespread:

Creation support from popular programs SDKs and toolkits for working with PDFs Standards for ensuring reliability Mindshare for global acceptance as a first-class format

A wide variety of tools both open-source and commercial

A thriving ecosystem

What does the future hold?Through community ownership, PDF is getting back to its strengths

Concerns that PDF will lose its purpose are overblown

However, adoption of PDF 2.0 will be a slow process No freely available version of standard Legacy of existing documents is a lot of inertia

Reliable interchange relies on reliable writers Minimum acceptable standards accepted by the community need to

be reasonable achievable, or they will remain ignored

The best future is one where PDF plays to its strengths More reliable visual presentation comes with tradeoffs

Reliable archive and interchange means minimum standards

Remain flexible where possible, don’t encourage flexibility where harmful

Co-exist well with technology that solves some problems better than PDF

What does the future hold?

A good history of PDF through Acrobat changes at http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/history/1

An article of the era where PDFs were getting personalized ads: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/adobe-brings-yahoo-adsense-to-pdf-documents/1863/

A good history of some of HTML’s growing pains: http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html

Sources and further reading

Any Questions?Matt Kuznicki

Chief Technical Officermattk@datalogics.comLinkedIn: mattkuznicki

Datalogics Inc.www.datalogics.com

Twitter: @DatalogicsInc