Seen in Lucerne last Saturday (2009-11-07). It was still like this when I came by again 8 hours later in the evening. I don’t think any comment is necessary. 
Thanks to Jürgen for pointing this out to me!
Matthew Hardy announced a new prerelease of the PDFXML Plug-in für Adobe Acrobat 9. PDFXML used to be called Mars and is a XML-friendly representation of PDF (borrowing heavily on SVG). Now only the project itself is still called Mars. I wonder if this is an indicator that Adobe will put more energy into promoting this new format in the future. I’ve already blogged about it some time ago.
The Clematis on my balcony is in full bloom again. In the background, mount Pilatus still has a little bit of snow. But it’s getting less every day.
On days like today, it is really hard after a 5-minute break in Balconia to go back into the home office just because the notebook display isn’t bright enough to work outside. Sigh.
I’ve been to Amsterdam a number of times and will go there again for ApacheCon EU 2008. I always took the train or night train. So, nine days before departure I look again into the best way to get there and back. But despite all the discussions about CO2 and all that, something is still very wrong with the picture I have to paint…
I’ve got a 4 year old IBM ThinkPad X31 which served me very well. But it’s time now for a new notebook. I want something as small as my X31. It should be affordable but ideally have a better display. Yesterday, Lenovo announced the new ThinkPad X300. Hot!
Various open source projects will be represented at the OpenExpo in Berne (12./13. March 2008), among them the Apache projects FOP, Lenya and OfBiz. It’s a good opportunity to get in touch with people from the respective project teams and to learn more about the products. OpenExpo also offers various interesting presentations (mostly in German!) and much more. Entrance is free. Tickets can be ordered on the website. See you there…
PDF has been around for some time and is widely used. Lately, with buying Macromedia, Adobe’s strategy towards PDF changes more and more, and IMO not in a good direction. The “open” standard is gradually closed down as Adobe adds features that forces you to buy their software. Anyway, 2007 is going to be interesting for the PDF world:
Microsoft popped up with their XPS which is similar to PDF but based on XML. That’s generally a good idea, but I don’t like Microsoft imposing their “interesting” XML-style on us (see WordML). Furthermore, they’ve reinvented the wheel by defining a completely new graphical XML language instead of leveraging existing standards.
Adobe answered with Mars, an “XML-friendly implementation of PDF syntax”. Without going into much detail with either standard, I prefer the Adobe approach because Mars is based on the standards SVG, PNG and JPEG. They’ve added only the stuff needed to make a round-trip from and to PDF.
Right now, I wish we had an answer coming from the real open community, something like OpenDocument, but for paged media. But throwing in yet another proposal won’t help much, I assume. We’ll have to see what happens and encourage Adobe to keep Mars as open as possible (for example by giving it to the W3C as a better alternative to SVG Print).
Yeah, I know. I hope I’ll have something worth reading from time to time. We’ll see…
This is the weblog of Jeremias Märki.