A World Of Documents

The W3C’s SVG working group has somewhat silently updated the SVG Print Working Draft last month. SVGP adds elements to embed multiple pages in a single SVG 1.2 file plus it adds color handling to match the additional requirements for printing. The draft seems a lot clearer and more useful now. It has been split into two parts (Primer and Language).

As I hinted in an earlier post, I feel that SVG Print may already be coming too late (although it has been in development for more 4 years now). Mars looks more interesting (a spec update is coming up, I heard). The packaging of binary resources (images, fonts etc.) in a ZIP file is very efficient and versatile while this is sort of an unsolved problem in SVG Print. The Primer hints at the use of Multiplex MIME (RFC 3391) which is possibly more difficult to handle than a ZIP archive. Over all SVG Print gives me the impression that it’s not much more than a research project by Canon’s research labs. Not that Adobe’s Mars is much more than that right now. In that regard, Microsoft’s XPS has probably evolved further. Too bad, Mars is still my favourite approach if I had to choose an alternative to PDF.

It didn’t suffice that Adobe Acrobat 7 used and expected a PDF/A namespace from an old specification draft (http://www.aiim.org/pdfa/ns/id.html). Now, it turns out that the official ISO document (ISO 19005-1:2005) had to be corrected, too. The document uses “http://www.aiim.org/pdfa/ns/id” as the PDF/A namespace. After a problem report today from a client trying out Acrobat 8 on a supposedly PDF/A-compliant file generated by Apache FOP, I found out that the PDF/A committee has published a corrigendum in which they are correcting the PDF/A namespace to “http://www.aiim.org/pdfa/ns/id/” (note the trailing slash). Furthermore, I think there’s an additional problem with metadata handling since the “Subject” is not mapped to dc:subject anymore, but to dc:description["x-default"]. Looks like I just got some more work to do…