mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Adam Warner <address@hidden>]

On Sat, 2002-02-16 at 10:11, Phil Mendelsohn wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 04:22:30PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> > Now that pdf has become more standard, it would be worth it
> > to write a direct TeXmacs->pdf converter.
> 
> Hrm, I think that supporting .pdf is not particularly pure Open
> Source.  It is a proprietary format, owned by Adobe, who are
> responsible for the Sk{y|l}arov fiasco.  I have seen several articles
> on advocating people to use truly free and open standards, and am not
> sure that one of them isn't a Stallman piece.
> 
> I only mention this because I know that there was some concern with
> following strict GNU/GPL guidelines.  Perhaps this isn't an issue
> after all?

No it really isn't an issue Phil. Ask yourself why you're using the
proprietary Adobe Postscript format to print documents. It's because
it's a very popular and good format that is well documented (allowing
free implementations to be written). Just because it was created by a
single company doesn't make it bad. Sometimes it can make it universally
useful.

The same applies to the Adobe Portable Document Format. Adobe may do
annoying things with its Reader (like poor rendering of bitmap fonts)
but that doesn't make the PDF format itself unsound (and you can use
free software readers like Ghostview). We have to be careful to work
around/not implement any part of any specification that is patent
protected and not released under a free software compatible licence.

I just checked here and Adobe licenses a number of their PDF-related
patents on a royalty-free basis whenever you produce software that
produces or interprets PDF files:

http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/legalnotices.html

I am interested in the licensing of web-related standards on a
royalty-free basis and I agree we should always be cognisant of these
issues.

Regards,
Adam