[ale] Still no flames... :-)

[Jeff Hubbs]

Geoffrey wrote:

>ChangingLINKS.com wrote:
>  
>
>>On Tuesday August 23 2005 12:58, Jim Popovitch wrote:
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>>>PDF sucks.
>>>
>>>-Jim P.
>>>      
>>>
>>I agree. I haven't liked using it . . . even when I was using Windows.
>>I don't see why people tolerate it.
>>
>>It's one thing to hate M$ . . .
>>. . . it's another to support something that sucks worse than M$.
>>    
>>
>
>What is it that sucks about it?  It's supported on virtually every 
>existing platform.  That's a whole lot more then can be said for M$ Office.
>
>  
>
That *is* a very good question, but "It's supported on virtually every
existing platform" is, to me, not a justification nor a good contrary point.

PDF seems to be a "half-open" format; up to a certain point, it seems to 
be as open as you please.  However, Adobe seems to wall off some 
functionality within their closed-source Linux product and also, in a 
more general way, they seem to set some functionality out of reach of 
arbitrarily-written apps that read/write PDF.  Somewhere way beyond that 
wall - and correct me if i'm wrong, someone - is functionality that can 
get you charged with a crime if you write code to implement it (i.e., 
having to do with password-encoded content).