Beyond PDF: Digital Delivery Develops

摘要

The PDF, Adobe's wildly popular electronic distribution format, has come a long way since its humble begin-nings back in 1993. With more than a half million Acrobat Readers worldwide, it has become the de facto standard for distributing documents on the Web. Its dual role of providing a way to preserve formatting and layout and making it easy to print documents has made it the format of choice. Yet it has its share of critics who complain that it's not the most effective digital distribution method. Among its most famous broadsides was Jakob Nielsen's June, 2001 Alert Box column in which he concluded that the PDF was great for printing out documents, but lousy for online reading. Others complain about Acrobat Reader's load time, especially on Web sites. In spite of these criticisms, the PDF has solidified its place as the leader in electronic document distribution. Yet the story can't simply end there, can it? Surely technology must find a way for digital publishing to evolve, and, in fact, there are a number of competing and complimentary technologies on the market that push the digital delivery methodology well beyond the elementary PDF (Portable Document Format). Even Adobe has recognized that the PDF format has certain limitations and recently come out with a platform to use the PDF as a front end to distribute information throughout the enterprise using XML.