[xsl] Office 2007, XSL-FO, and the Adobe "Save as PDF" (non)native-support...

["M. David Peterson" <m.david@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

I believe this is on topic, as it seems like a fair number of folks on  
this list who implement XSL-FO solutions for the printing industry (or any  
other industry for that matter) can provide some interesting insite as to  
how providing "Save as PDF..." support could help or hurt the printing  
industry, especially those who implement solutions using XSL-FO.

For those unaware, as per Brian Jones (MS Office XML PM) announcement  
yesterday  
<http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06/02/613702.aspx>, Adobe  
is no longer comfortable with MS providing "Save as PDF..." support as a  
directly supported feature of the up and coming release of Office 2007

In a follow-up comment  
<http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06/02/613702.aspx#616043>  
Karl De Abrew writes:

"It's entirely permissable for a company to create a product which  
confirms to the PDF reference  
(http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/index_reference.html - see  
page 8) including bookmarks and all other interactive elements. The only  
obvious exceptions are some technical areas relating to PDFs which have  
been "activated" with Acrobat Professional or Adobe LiveCycle software for  
commenting, form completion (and saving) using Adobe Reader."

"The activePDF product you are referring to is a server product, but this  
has no relevance to the discussion here. You can equally find products  
such as our Nitro PDF which provides a drop-in replacement for Adobe  
Acrobat."

"As an interesting aside for some -- as a PDF based ISV for over 10 years  
-- we felt that Microsoft's efforts to provide a Save As PDF were (going  
to be) positive for the industry and would result in dramatically  
increasing the number of PDF files in distribution, thereby increasing the  
demand for other software products that can operate on them. Granted, ISVs  
such as ourselves would need to remain nimble to ensure that we were  
continuing to offer services that were in demand."

My follow up to his last paragraph:

"That's a REALLY interesting point.  I should bring this up on XSL-List,  
as there are obviously a TON of folks who could provide some interesting  
insite on this matter.  It would be especially interesting to hear G. Ken  
Holman's thoughts on the matter given his fine tuned expertise in  
XSL-FO..."

To make sure this conversation stays on the topic of XSL (please, I beg of  
thee... Don't let this turn into Yet Another Reason for Tommie to pull me  
aside and beat me senseless!!! ;) :D) I ask one simple question:

Does providing the ability to save a Word document as PDF natively,  
out-of-the-box (apparently they will counteract the apparent demand by  
Adobe by providing the support as a separate download) provide even  
greater opportunity for XSL-FO by increasing the number of PDF documents,  
or does it hurt XSL-FO my making it less relavent to the needs of the  
printing industry?

Thanks again for keeping this on topic! :D

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