mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Stephane Payrard <address@hidden>]

On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, Adam Warner wrote:

> 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
> 

I am a perl programmer. This sort of stuff (importing/exporting) can probably
be written in Perl. I have seen that there a bunch of PDF related libraires
in CPAN; what is the one relevant to our problem?

-- 
Stéphane Payrard -- s.payrard@@wanadoo.fr