At 18:01 +0000 1998/12/14, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>> Clearly the disadvantage with PDF is that it is a commercial product, and
>> that it is somewhat too primitive to be used as a WWW-bytecode standard.

>Is it any more (or less) commercial than PostScript?

I recall that these are made by the same company, so they probably sport
the same problems.

As an example of the problems that may arise is the story of Display
PostScript, which companies such as Apple decided to not use, because they
felt Adobe was overcharging the license fees. Then Apple was one of the
companies helping starting Adobe, in order to help forwarding electronic
typesetting. And now, ehen DPS is no longer hot, it will appear in Apple's
next OS, Rhapsody.

So with those commercial products, one must expect that everybody tries to
bust everybody. It may still happen that things may forward in a more
open-minded fashion, but you cannot count on it.

  Hans Aberg
                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
                  * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
                  * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>