61–70 of 71 posts
The discussion around this being a non-free standard encumbered with license restrictions makes me wonder: is there an alternative for pixel-perfect rich document rendering? HTML needs sandboxing to be safe, rtf is barebones, and .docx has external dependencies.
Half-joking—-Does the standard explain why some documents I open in Acrobat Reader ask me if I want to save, when I only opened the file (and made no intentional edits)??
And no, the standard doesn’t concern itself with that particular behavior. Also, many PDFs “in the wild” do not fully conform to the standard, because Acrobat Reader is so lenient.
The discussion around this being a non-free standard encumbered with license restrictions makes me wonder: is there an alternative for pixel-perfect rich document rendering? HTML needs sandboxing to be safe, rtf is barebones, and .docx has external dependencies.
I downloaded their example file and it's entirely binary, unlike PDF which is just pseudo-binary, but Evince did open it and it seems unlike PDF it's entirely raster based and would require a separate OCR layer on top of the text to make it eligible for copy-paste, if that's one of the goals
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legal is a cost center, which means that they don't get to say no. Here is how that conversation goes: Lawyer: You must include my unenforceable EULA. Anyone-with-a-brain: lol, no. Your "contribution" to this project only serves to do the direct opposite of our stated intent... Actually, why are you involving yourself here - are you billing for this? Lawyer scampering noises recede into the distance
As a recovering lawyer, all I will say is that, it is extremely rare for any lawyer to have the power to do anything directly themselves of their own initiative, which is even more true in business than in other areas of law (lawyers can railroad their immigration, criminal defense, family law, etc clients a bit more because these clients have even less clue what is the right thing to do). More likely in your scenari…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? Who says that they don't work well? All of the manufactured goods that you own, and how they got transported (e.g., shipping containers, boats, fuel for boats, etc) are probably based a dozens of ISO (and ANSI, SAE, etc ) standards that had to be paid for. It's been the norm for about a century and helped build the modern wo…
They don’t work well for product development. I’ve worked in consumer and medical product development for 30+ years. I’ve worked as a consultant or contractor or directly for companies from startups to Fortune 50. So many small companies or even teams at big companies don’t know about the standards that they should follow (ISO, ASME, UL etc) or if they do they don’t want to pay for them. Then there’s the complexity o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who would have thought that "international standards" that require payment don't work well? Who says that they don't work well? All of the manufactured goods that you own, and how they got transported (e.g., shipping containers, boats, fuel for boats, etc) are probably based a dozens of ISO (and ANSI, SAE, etc ) standards that had to be paid for. It's been the norm for about a century and helped build the modern wo…
They don’t work well for product development. I’ve worked in consumer and medical product development for 30+ years. I’ve worked as a consultant or contractor or directly for companies from startups to Fortune 50. So many small companies or even teams at big companies don’t know about the standards that they should follow (ISO, ASME, UL etc) or if they do they don’t want to pay for them. Then there’s the complexity o…
I've used the ISO standards to develop smart card software. Before that I'd mostly consulted IETF standards.
The IETF standards are carefully crafted, clearly written by someone with experience in developing the thing they are documenting. That's probably because it's IEFT policy to insist on working code before the standard is ratified. The approach seems to be making it possible to to develop an interoperable version with that existing code just from the published standard. Since that's inevitably what you are trying to do it's a joy to work with.
The ISO standards on the other hand come across as brain dump made to look organised by the addition of bullet points, numbered lists and a table of contents. They give no explanation on why they made the design decisions behind the standard, so you end up having to re-discover it all yourself. It takes forever.
Having to pay for the ISO standards just adds insult to injury. As I was developing something that was a one off (I later open sourced most of it), I could not justify the thousands ISO was demanding. Fortunately if you dig long and hard enough, you can find copies of most of it lying around on the web.
Nothing encumbered by fees or patents should be accepted as a "standard." Period.
The problem is that work on standards costs a lot of money. Somehow we need to pay for that. The solution could be the state.
The discussion around this being a non-free standard encumbered with license restrictions makes me wonder: is there an alternative for pixel-perfect rich document rendering? HTML needs sandboxing to be safe, rtf is barebones, and .docx has external dependencies.
The discussion around this being a non-free standard encumbered with license restrictions makes me wonder: is there an alternative for pixel-perfect rich document rendering? HTML needs sandboxing to be safe, rtf is barebones, and .docx has external dependencies.
I've only had tangential contact with it, but Wikipedia claims ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu#Format_licensing ) that DjVu is open, albeit they do talk about patents and I'm not qualified to say where that falls on the non-free spectrum I downloaded their example file and it's entirely binary, unlike PDF which is just pseudo-binary, but Evince did open it and it seems unlike PDF it's entirely raster based and w…
Not really all that different from PDF:
"Like PDF, DjVu can contain an OCR text layer, making it easy to perform copy and paste and text search operations." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu
DjVu however really does seem to be biased toward scanned-origin documents, not digitally produced ones.