FROM THE ARCHIVE: Adobe Systems – Making Crippled Proprietary ...

Adobe Systems are well-known, either directly or indirectly, to a large number of the population of the Internet. Making some of the most popular multimedia formats on computers today, along with the standard in professional image editing , some of their media formats have become standardised. I have a problem with that, though: I don’t see how file formats so fundamentally restrictive and, in some cases, crippled, could become the standard file formats of the Internet. My objections to them go back to about 1998, around about the time when I discovered some of their file formats. There are two file formats which are linked to Adobe which almost all of the users here will have experienced: the Portable Document Format or PDF file, and the Flash Player’s .swf files. I have objections to both of these file formats, and the fact that they have become standardised fills me with disgust. The Portable Document Format was first developed in 1993 as a replacement for Adobe’s PostScript format, a computer language for the rendering of files. Integrating a file’s contents into a single unit, PDF was different to its predecessors, such as LaTeX and PostScript, which used commands embedded in a text file to characterise properties of that text. This led to the advantage of being able to render files exactly the same on every platform, but also led to some massive disadvantages. So, the DOC file, written in a format which is notoriously human-unreadable when processed as ASCII, ended up smaller than a PDF file? That’s pretty embarrassing. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with binary-encoded files. Note that the XML-based .odt file comes in at a ridiculous 33KB smaller than the PDF, and when you get to the command-based LaTeX file, you’re talking about a file half the size! Have you ever opened a PDF file in a web-browser? Usually, it opens an Adobe Reader session inside the browser, which leaves the browser unusable as it tries to process a file that may be megabytes in size, and sometimes slows down the whole computer at the same time. The reasonable thing would be to save the file and open it with a discrete PDF reader, but this doesn’t stop a 2.5MB file still being a slow, annoying mess a lot of the time, especially as the gap between files like ODT is just getting larger as the files get longer. But wait, there’s more to dislike about PDF files! You know the way that PDF is a standard file format? It’s only been an open standard since 2008, despite being in existence since 1993. That means that since it became popular, people have had to use a proprietary program to open these files, or else use a gross hack. Indeed, it was even harder to create hacks to read PDF files than read and write that other standard proprietary file format, the DOC file, because at least the DOC files had some semblance of human legibility in ASCII, unlike the ridiculously binarised PDFs. The fact that it became an open standard in the first place makes me utterly confused as well, because until its acceptance by the ISO, if you wanted to write PDF files, you had to use proprietary software anyway. Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’ll have a look at that other Adobe proprietary format which has become unfathomably popular, even more so since the introduction of YouTube. The Flash format was devised by Macromedia in 1996, bought by Adobe in 2005, and has since become the standard video format of choice for the Internet. Guess what? It’s proprietary as well. In fact, despite being the standard format of much of the Internet’s videos, it hasn’t become an open standard. This is rather annoying to me, a person who uses open-source software when available. Indeed, most variants of Linux don’t include Flash as a standard option, because it’s not open-source and there’s no open-source player available. It’s only a minor criticism, but it’s one nonetheless, because Adobe once again holds people back with a standard format which happens to be proprietary.

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