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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

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• Re: Generating a PDF that looks good in Abobe Acrobat Reader?, Stephane Payrard, 03/16/2002

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