# Adobe pushes Flash and PDF for open government, misses irony

## Adobe is pushing hard to get Flash, PDF, and other technologies used to …

The Obama administration has made transparency and public access to government information a high priority. Adobe is attempting to capitalize on initiatives to make government information more accessible while promoting its technologies, such as Flash and PDF, as cornerstones for implementing open access. However, these technologies are actually an impediment to making information truly accessible.

Adobe has set up its "Adobe Opens Up" website to promote the use of Adobe technologies to achieve the goal of "opening up Washington," as well as highlighting ways in which federal, state, and local governments have implemented these technologies. While we agree that making information available in common formats, like PDF, is one helpful piece of this puzzle, we can't help but notice how the entire site—designed in Flash—is practically inaccessible.

After just a cursory browsing, here are some of the usability and data accessibility issues we observed. You can't select, copy, or paste any text. Your browser's font override features won't work, so you can't adjust the font or its size to be more readable. Your browser's built-in in-page search won't work, and you can't use the keyboard to scroll through the text. You can't parse or scrape the data in any way; the design is fixed-width, so it's not going to work well on different screen sizes; and browser plugins, like Greasemonkey, can't adjust anything. Basically when it comes to text at all, if you don't like the style or are visually impaired, you're screwed.

All the content of Adobe's "open government" site is locked inside of Flash.

Sunlight Labs, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington, DC based organization focused on digitization of government data and making tools and websites to make it easily accessible, similarly feels that technologies like Flash and PDF—while ubiquitous and useful—do not intrinsically make government more open. In particular, the group is critical of the fact that data in PDF format is not easily parsable into other useful forms.

PDFs are great for presenting data and information in a particular format, and the format is a useful tool for getting that formatted version to the public. Anyone who has tried to copy and paste more than one line of text from a PDF, though, has likely experienced the issues that can happen—unrelated text from sidebars or the margins often ends up inline, requiring custom editing. As one example to illustrate the problem further, Sunlight Labs recently had to write custom software to parse a 1,018 page healthcare reform bill (H.R. 3200 "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009") that was provided to the public only in PDF format. Without this parsing, any analysis of the text would need to be done by hand.

Further, we note the irony of the fact that the bill Sunlight Labs was attempting to analyze is actually stored internally in XML format, but only offered to the public in PDF form. XML is easily converted to a formatted PDF, which is what the House did to generate the PDF that it made available. Going the other direction—from formatted PDF to structured, machine-readable data—is a much harder, and sometimes insurmountable, task. It's also worth noting that XML is also easily transformed to other structured formats, like HTML.

Wrapping all publicly accessible information in proprietary formats is neither a good nor complete solution. Providing documents in PDF form, or augmenting a website with additional Flash content is certainly useful. However, the goal of open government would be better served using open standards, like HTML, XML, JSON, ODF, and other formats that are both accessible and machine-readable. Doing so ensures that public information truly remains usable by the public.

1. quote:
Originally posted by bstone:
quote:
Originally posted by RGMBill:
Wow, a lot of Microsoft hating....

While I use PDF all the time, it has it's problems, chief among them the lack of useful low cost or free editing tools for PDF in Windows; it's possible to WRITE PDFs cheaply, but editing is not, at least not without some very expensive Adobe software.

As for FLASH.... my wife loves making small Flash banners for Websites she creates (she has a side business). Occasionally, she'll do something larger, or find a good use for Flash elsewhere. I'm not hostile to Flash. But I'd like to point out that the US Navy, at least, does not authorize Flash on any US computer, and it's not allowed per the Gold disk standard. I'm writing this during lunch on my work machine (I work for the Navy). No Flash. Can't have it. I can have Firefox, or Chrome, but not Flash.

So the idea of doing eGov with Flash... well, that's not happening, at least not eNavy or eMarines.

For a second I thought you were talking about ms office text files, spreadsheets, databases, presentations, or outlook...

Did you realize that MS word is too good now for ms works?

SO MUCH MONEY...

good question sir. Very good question.

*edit* what's the navy's policy on silverlight? Or ActiveX?

Wow, your sarcasm seems to have no bounds. Yes, the military uses the Microsoft Office suite, but that's beside the point; they've become the industry standard long, long ago. And just because my desktop at my desk uses Windows doesn't mean that most of my WORK uses Windows or any Microsoft product (Suffice it to say I spent most of my day working on *nix based platforms; my "personal" work desktop is Windows, as is my home laptop, but that's not where I spend most of my working hours). BTW, the one time in the last few years where I had to "one off" a purchase of MS Office (it wasn't an NMCI machine) for government use, we obtained the full up Professional copy, fully licensed, for $230. Adobe Acrobat Pro runs$543 off the same GSA schedule, and only provided the equivalent of MS Word (i.e., no Access, no Excel, no Outlook, no Powerpoint, etc.). You tell me which is being a good steward of the defense dollars that our country has. Yes, StarOffice/OpenOffice, etc., would potentially be cheaper, but as I said, MS Office has become the defacto industry standard.

Silverlight and ActiveX are also not allowed on NMCI machines; I'd like to install Silverlight because one tool that I can use at home that would be somewhat useful at work uses it (and idiotically, some sites that military users are starting to add ActiveX/Silverlight/Flash as requirements.... yeah, those folks are going to do well when folks can't use the site)
2. What's the problem?

I love PDFs. They look nice, they are easy to create (on a Mac or *nix), and they print nice. Even my damn phone displays them well.

I like LaTeX too, but I'm kind of a nut. It's also trivial to do a LaTeX to PDF conversion. I don't imagine many folks compose in LaTeX though.

As for Flash, I still don't get how Adobe lets it suck so damn hard on Mac/Linux as far as efficiency is concerned. Silverlight, from f***ing Microsoft of all people, performs much, much better. That should embarrass the hell out of Adobe.
3. Personally I have no issue with PDFs. Just about every journal, papers and proceedings I get is in PDF format and it works well.

As for flash, that should stay in the realm of youtube and Happy Tree Friends.
4. quote:
Originally posted by audioSE:
quote:
Originally posted by zonk3r:
The people that hate PDFs need to consider what they were designed for: the printing industry. If you work in it you'll understand why they've become a godsend, even with their problems.

Man, with the way people aren't considering the printing industry, it's almost like we're not talking about the printing industry!

Huh? People are complaining about a screwdriver not being a hammer. Use the right tools for the job. PDF was created specifically for printing. People have found that it just so happens to work very well for a lot of other things too. If you don't like it find another tool.
5. I haven't had time to read every comment, but many people seem to miss the point about PDFs.

They are excellent for formatted print output. However, many times what people want to do with government data is parse it themselves. Extract the information and do fact checking, processing, etc. The government should make that data available.

An XML format would make more sense, especially when, as in the example given in the article, the government already had the XML document, but only provided the PDF version to the public.

Data needs to be made available to the people who have paid for it's gathering and creation. Transformations can always be done by others. I don't object to a PDF version being available in addition to data, but the base form must be there for others to use.

A big use of PDFs in the government is for forms. Unfortunately, this is another area where Adobe has locked their "open" format down. Government forms can be downloaded, and sometimes filled in electronically, but not saved. Saving is available in a fairly expensive version of Acrobat.

I've found that I can save information into those documents using the Preview.app on Mac, but if I open the filled in documents on a Windows computer, the filled in text will not print; it's rendered invisible. So much for openness.

Full disclosure: I'm a government employee and advocate of making data available to the taxpayers in an easily parse-able form.
6. quote:
Originally posted by bstone:
quote:
Originally posted by David Buxton:
quote:
Originally posted by bstone:
quote:
Originally posted by DrPizza:
quote:
PDF has been the benchmark electronic paper standard since 1982

You're kidding, right?

Thank you for your probing insight.

His probing insight was that PDF has not been the benchmark electronic paper standard since 1982. And it certainly was not the benchmark electronic paper standard even when it was finally introduced in 1992.

Postscript and pdf have been standard in publishing for decades. Much earlier then '92 iirc.

PDF != Postscript.

PDF dates from 1993.
7. Love the use of ClickToFlash here.
8. Complaining about a fixed-width design on this site? That's funny
9. As much as I generally dislike Adobe, I decided to follow the "Adobe Opens Up" link to see how well they could twist their proprietary standards and overpriced software to make them sound "essential" for an "open government." I wasn't on the page for more than a couple minutes before the flash plugin crashed.

Good thing I use Chrome now, so a poorly built plugin can't take down the entire browser. Flash represents the very worst of Internet technologies.
10. I'm left wondering... why is it that a page based presentation scheme is preferable to a numbered outline form with continuous flow?

Page numbers should never be referenced in documents that might be revised. Instead, legal documents, like those generated by our government, should have numbered sections and paragraphs. A fringe benefit of this in the computer era is that presentation can be optimized for different circumstances. Visual impairment, language translation, screen size, etc. PDFs are about the worst possible solution with regard to those issues.

PDF is a great interim technology. It has excellently bridged the gap between the paper and electronic document eras. Unfortunately this means that it carries baggage as well. PDF is simply a necessary evil... for now. While it is readable on most platforms, it is still a convoluted mess. Someday we'll look back at PDFs and be amazed at the complexity they impose. For now though, they're still the best solution for a lot of scenarios.
11. On pdf, most of the comments are actually reasons for the government to use it. The issue is that what the government wants is really the appearance of transparency. pdf's are fine for this and do not provide the sometimes politically inconvenient access to the raw data, which would allow different assumptions to be applied to the data analysis.

On flash, not much discussion here. I cannot even run flash on my computer/os (openbsd amd64 version). Well, this is not quite true. There is a security vetted flash in ports, but it is so old that I have never seen a flash website that it would work on. The issue here is security and adobe is not very good at it. I wonder what possible reason a government who seems to spend a lot of money on cyber terrorism would want someone to download a product that last I heard had 12 exploits in it. I sort of think microsoft does a better job on security than adobe, but I have not stayed up on this. I suppose another reason to avoid flash is that flash is very proprietary and does not even adhere to whatever their internal standard is, as witness the incompatibilities between versions.

Adobe itself is pretty evil. I note the proposed html video tag was torpedoed, by among other people. Adobe, presumedly because they did not want their rice bowl broken.
12. quote:
Originally posted by handel:

I may have misinterpreted what was written.

If the documents need to be editable, then I agree that PDF is not a suitable format.

But I would question the need for the public to edit government documents. Why, exactly, is this a requirement? Surely, in the interests of clarity, the government documents should be somehow locked down.

Editing isn't the point, and locking down isn't the requirement.

The requirement is that unaltered publications be easily identifiable -- that it be convenient, ideally at the push of a button, to check whether the document you're looking is an unaltered copy.

The point is analysis and representation using tools.

Any format can be digitally signed, so what's being touted as an advantage for PDF isn't. At all. And when it comes to access to the content for analysis and representation, PDF fails, miserably.

PDFs are formatted for print. That means they have hyphenation and page breaks mangling everything about the content: words and paragraphs and images and everything else gets split and reordered and rearranged arbitrarily.

So tools can't reliably find even a word boundary, let alone any more meaningful structure. And the PDF instructions any given tool generates to represent that structure is _not_ standardized. One tool will generate perfectly-standard PDF to put pretty footnotes on a page that looks absolutely nothing like what another tool generates.

You might as well be arguing that all government documents should be distributed as JPEG images of originals handwritten in cursive by whoever happened to have time, since we have freely-available OCR tools and JPEG is a standard format, too.

This comment was edited by jthill on October 31, 2009 19:04

This comment was edited by jthill on October 31, 2009 19:04

This comment was edited by jthill on October 31, 2009 19:04
13. quote:
Originally posted by pebblesonthemountain:
Ars has been traditionally biased against Adobe products, most specifically Flash and PDF. A higher level of interaction between Adobe and Ars would be a great way to dispel myths, misrepresentations and flat out erroneous comments frequently made by the Ars journalism team that obviously never use Adobe products.

I hope to see you and other Adobe personnel in here in the future to pulpit thump for PDF and Flash since both are exceptionally good products that get bad reputations by people that know less than zero about them.

By 'thump' you mean 'shill', right? Wow, that spiel's better than what I've seen from Adobe Marketing...

Some of us have the sad misfortune of knowing better, let's review what we know about PDF and Flash:

1/ Before the Macromedia acquisition, PDF was a format that was actually useful and lived up to its name. Readable, searchable, and sometimes even editable in Adobe's progressively buggier by version app, Acrobat. Heck, Acrobat used to be the buggiest product Adobe made. That's been supplanted by Flash. I know because http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ and persistent crashing of the Flash plugin on my Mac tells me so.

2/ Everyone's consternation started when the MBA decided that his newest acquistion, Fuh-lash, had to be embedded in everything. Flash embedded in PDF. PDF embedded in Flash.

Or in the case of the US Gov't 'Open' [Hah!] site, Flash embedded in PDF embedded in Flash that 95% of everyone will Flashblock.

But tut tut, we must make those numbers to pay for, or at least not become levered up to our eyeballs from the last acquisition. So just embed our stuff, not anything useful.

3/ Did I, and a number of commenters here mention, that the world hates Flash? That it's uniquely suited ONLY for sites like 'hamster dance' or SouthPark?

I predict the same time next year Adobe will be embedding spyware ^h^h^h^h^h^h 'analytics' in PDF, and Leonard will be back here defending PDF as 'Open' blah blah blah.

Leonard's right- The original PDF *was* open and useful. I really miss those two nice ol' guys from Palo Alto and their baby.

The fact that he also has to defend, in the same breath all the crapware tech that Adobe M&A'd and shovels into PDF in the same breath is… well it all kinda leaves me speechless. And shows us how desperate Adobe is to remain relevant when they really haven't innovated anything since those two old nice guys left.

It's kind of an 'oh, how the mighty have fallen' feeling.

PDF is a great format as long as you leave 'the new Adobe' and all their mergers and acquisitions out of it.

Of course, soon the rest of the country will feel the same pain that System Admins and IT Personnel in enterprise have felt for years. I don't know whether to lament or break out the popcorn.

-Drunken Economist
http://mindtaker.blogspot.com/
14. I like pdf as a format for presentation and archive of many kinds of documents (note that Preview does my viewing work, not Reader). Limitations wrt to editing and data manipulation mean it is not the best format for every purpose.

Noting Adobe's PR effort coinciding with all this, I'd take their push with some salt.

The web site animations are kinda cute, but I note the window wants ~150% of my 2.8 GHz Mac Pro's cpus (that's out of 800%) so it would give a C2D a bit of a rev. Not to mention smaller portable devices. At least it politely lets go when the window is in the background.

1.
quote:

That may be true. But in terms of the fraction of collective man/woman hours spent using PDFs, I suspect that the print industry represents a major portion.

Perhaps the majority of man hours spent working with PDFs is done within the printing industry, but I wouldn't be so sure. PDFs are used pretty widely by people outside the industry. If every report the US government produces has to be released as a PDF, I am sure that right there you will have many more people using the format than work in the printing industry. And many of these people will want to spend as little time worrying about the intricacies of the format as possible. As long as Adobe designs and prices it products for Pros, and then expects the general populace to use them, they will not be addressing the needs of the _majority of users_.

2. With regard to editing of PDFs: I understand that PDF is intended for the final product, and there are good arguments for why in most cases you wouldn't want to edit a PDF. But there will always be times when a person needs to touch-up something, and it is possible to do so in some applications (a colleague recently fixed something using Illustrator that I could not figure out how to do with Acrobat Pro). I'm not saying I would like a full-layout page formatting program, and I am not really looking for something with all the ability of PowerPoint, but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for the ability to do simple edits on characters or words in Acrobat Pro.

3. For people arguing that it's a print-only format, there are many cases in which you want nicely formatted pages on screen, and I don't think there's a problem with using PDF. I very frequently read PDFs of scientific papers on my computer. Certainly, if you look at the mark-up tools in Acrobat Pro, Adobe recognizes PDFs utility as an on-screen format.

4.
quote:
I was under the impression that programs like LaTeX could provide this functionality.

LaTeX is quite similar to .html . It's great for generating beautifully formatted equations, but not for displaying them--with LaTeX you have to generate a page to see the laid-out equations. But reading LaTeX source files is a lot like reading .html. A simple equation (integral of x from 0 to 1 = 1/2) looks like this:

\int_0^1 x \ dx = \frac{1}{2}

To see the nicely formatted one has to compile the equation into a readable form, at this point typically a PDF (historically .dvi and .ps were commonly used formats).

Edit: Fixed quotation
16. quote:
Originally posted by Tundro Walker:
PDF's are useful, it's just many of them run into them being mis-used. Far too many companies use PDF's to dump out "reports" or "metrics", which other dept's then have to use to number-crunch on. You can't just open it up and manipulate the data like an Excel file. You can't just import the damn data into a db as if it were a txt/csv file. Too many people up the chain of command seem to love using PDF's to create pretty-looking, hard-to-extract data.

This is why MBA's (*) generally should not be allowed into positions of authority in either the private or public sectors.

(*) and for other reasons along similar lines, accountants and lawyers. GM wasn't ruined by the recently ousted Waggoner--it was ruined by the previous string of bean-counters who focused only on cost savings, to the point of saving $0.50 by putting a plastic part in the core of automatic transmissions instead of metal stampings... resulting in multitudes of$1,000+ payments to dealerships for warranty work, not to mention pissed off customers. A failure rate of about 1 in 2000 would be a financial break-even point... but the number of customers who left GM and never came back over that stupidity is immense -- "My $40,000 Cadillac is undrivable with a dead transmission because upper management decided to shave costs by less than$1/vehicle?!?!?!? WTF, I'm buying German."
17. A few points not brought up in the thread:

1. This site should have been HTML, not Flash, but that begs the point that many HTML pages are increasingly "opaque": they are really JavaScript programs that create/manipulate some HTML scaffolding which cannot be understood on its own. An AJAX-style JavaScript version of this site that read its data in JSON format or even in XML, would not necessary have been much more accessible or reusable than the SWF site Adobe's agency delivered. The direction of HTML5 work and recent browser features is all about "web applications" support and will exacerbate this trend. HTML is also not easy to reliably parse/process because of its loose syntactical rules, yet the HTML5 "pave the cowpaths" approach has killed work on XHTML. In short, the Semantic Web aspect of HTML is going backwards, not forwards, as browser vendors fixate on web application support, in effect trying to duplicate that which Flash already does quite well, at the expense of HTML's original core strengths of being a declarative, structured hypertext document representation.

2. XML is not a panacea when you are talking about information that needs some presentational representation. It's good but insufficient.

3. There's a new portable document format in town - EPUB, which is fast becoming the standard for eBooks. EPUB is an XML-based open standard, builds on XHTML and DAISY standards, and is far far simpler to create/manipulate than PDF, especially if you are starting from XML data. EPUB documents are also "reflowable" - they are not bound to a particular paginated representation. It's not a replacement for PDF, which is essentially a sequence of pages, but is really more the heir to the Semantic Web aspects of HTML. Unlike DOCX, EPUB is not tied to any particular application's architecture or feature set. Adobe's backing EPUB, but does not control it (other than the Adobe DRM being applied to commercial eBooks, but there's lots of public domain EPUB and folks like O'Reilly are distributing EPUB without any DRM). EPUB is likely to play an even bigger role in the future.
18. Several observations:

1) Congress has offered XML versions of its bills for quite some time (I believe since the 110th Congress for the House and the 111th for the Senate). These are available from the Library of Congress at http://thomas.loc.gov/ - search for your bill, select the bill. If it takes you to the "Bill Summary and Status File", select "Text of Legislation", then click on the XML version in the top right. Not every bill is available this way, but a good number of the recent ones are (including HR HR 3200, HR 3962, and S1796).

a) Despite the Library of Congress's forward thinking on making legislation electronically-available, the electronic version of the U.S. Code is still issued in hard-wrapped plain text format. The Code of Federal Regulations is available in a similar format as well as in PDF, but the PDF pages are segmented by section number. When several sections appear on a page, trying to stitch the pages together is a complete mess: Downloading all the PDFs gives you a bunch of overlapping pages. Why not offer electronic versions of the regulations? The Government Printing Office makes money by selling paper books of the regulations. It is ridiculous that we have to pay twice (taxes, then a user fee) for the laws that we are REQUIRED TO FOLLOW.

2) Unless you use a mouse for everything and use Windows and have no need to select or search for text and don't want to extract text for processing in another program and don't mind your browser crashing every few minutes, Flash is an insanely preposterous choice for offering government information. Let me repeat: INSANELY PREPOSTEROUS!

3) PDF is good for providing "official" copies of documents such as court decisions and Public Laws (Congress has been providing digitally-signed PDF copies of Public Laws passed since 2008), but the government should also offer XML and plain text versions. There are even some nice standards available for signing the XML and text versions: X.509 and/or GPG. There is no need to lock people into PDF, which, as the article points out, is essentially useless when it comes to plain-text formatting. "Why would you want plain-text formatting when you have a beautiful paper-like PDF?" Well, for several reasons: a) if a user is visually-impaired, zooming around a page in 2 dimensions is impractical - a user should have the option to EASILY and ACCURATELY format it into a single column of large type for easy scrolling (cue XML/HTML or plain text); and b) I hate paper. One of the advantages of using a computer is that we do not need to use paper and its artificial limitation of "pages". PDF is a step backwards in this regard.
19. I just want to make it perfectly clear that we are not arguing that PDF and Flash need to be dismissed out of hand. The article clearly states that there are use cases for both technologies. However, Adobe appears to be trying to encourage wide government adoption of both of them, as well as other Adobe technologies as the basis for open government. This is what we disagree with.

Flash and/or PDF offer useful supplements to data and information supplied in other forms—we feel these other, more accessible forms should be available first, and the infrastructure need not rely solely on Acrobat, InDesign, Flash, etc to generate the data and present it to the public.
20. quote:
Originally posted by bstone:
PDF has been the benchmark electronic paper standard since 1982, and it's available on almost all platforms.

Really? I wonder how we wrote PDF files before Adobe Acrobat was released in 1993, 11 years later.

And on what computers.

</sarcasm>
21. quote:
Originally posted by freebeer:
AJAX-style JavaScript

You are aware that the J in AJAX stands for JavaScript, right?

quote:
Originally posted by freebeer:
XML is not a panacea when you are talking about information that needs some presentational representation. It's good but insufficient.

Please allow me to introduce you to XSL!

http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/

quote:
Originally posted by freebeer:
There's a new portable document format in town - EPUB, which is fast becoming the standard for eBooks.

ePUB is not much more than an extension of XHTML, and still requires ancillary files such as the metadata file (.opf), plus a contents/index file (.ncx), and you can have any number of files that make up the publication. It is even disguised as a single file by wrapping it up into a ZIP file and requires a mimetype file that must be the first file in the archive, in fact there is a whole, required directory structure (see OEBPS container format) within the ZIP archive. Extremely messy.

I'm not saying PDF is the best format, and obviously Flash is a long, long way from being useful for the purposes Adobe is trying to pimp it for, but ePUB is not the solution either.
22. They've been flooding Metro transit ads with big Adobe OpenGov posters. The most amusing part is that nobody seems to have even considered that people sitting on a bus or subway are most likely to use their phone to access the URL (in all likelihood having forgotten it by the time they get to a desktop) and while almost any phone can load HTML, a few can load PDF and almost none can handle the Flash mess.
23. quote:
Originally posted by davis:
quote:

Um, no. That is wrong. I can select sections of a PDF using Preview in OS X (the latest version). And if you have Acrobat (admittedly, a very expensive option) you have all sorts of ways of accessing the data.
Poor motor skills? When I select text in preview it selects on the text in the column, tried it on all 4 pages of the document, and the title etc. Maybe it's a 10.6 thing.

Yes, it is a 10.6 thing. Apple made a big deal about having to program an AI just for the text selection.
24. The New York Times has a tool for this: The Congress API. Announcement and developer info.

From the developer site:
quote:
With the Congress API, you can get summaries of roll-call votes in the U.S. Congress; get lists of members of Congress; and get vote data, floor appearances, biographical information and role data for individual House and Senate members. You can also get bill information (summaries and bill actions).

Now we just need a "President API" to go with it, and we'll be onto something.
25. quote:
Originally posted by leonardr:
I would like to point out two things here.

First and most important, PDF is NOT a proprietary technology - it is a COMPLETELY open standard from the ISO. PDF became ISO 32000 over 2 years ago.

Second, PDF supports a rich model for the tagging and structure of the data presented in the file. It is indeed unfortunate that many substandard products create PDF files that "lock in" the data - but the file format provides for rich semantic content and many higher quality products take advantage of those features.

Leonard Rosenthol
PDF Standards Architect

Download the Acrobat 9 press materials PDF and attempt to open it with a non-Adobe product. Not to edit, merely to read. Just try it and see how far you get.
26. quote:
Originally posted by deckeda:
quote:
Originally posted by leonardr:
I would like to point out two things here.

First and most important, PDF is NOT a proprietary technology - it is a COMPLETELY open standard from the ISO. PDF became ISO 32000 over 2 years ago.

Second, PDF supports a rich model for the tagging and structure of the data presented in the file. It is indeed unfortunate that many substandard products create PDF files that "lock in" the data - but the file format provides for rich semantic content and many higher quality products take advantage of those features.

Leonard Rosenthol
PDF Standards Architect

Download the Acrobat 9 press materials PDF and attempt to open it with a non-Adobe product. Not to edit, merely to read. Just try it and see how far you get.

You're saying that the pdf adobe produced to publicize their new edition of acrobat uses newer pdf features supported in acrobat 9 but perhaps lags in other editing software?

tell me more.
27. Ironically, I can't seem to find a .PDF of this article. Is there one forthcoming?
28. Interesting discussion with Sunlight, Adobe and others on Open Government on today’s Tech Tuesday on WAMU radio:

http://thekojonnamdishow.org/s...cles-open-government.

Check it out--definitely a lot of room for opinion on this important topic.
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