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Topic: Ansyr PDF Viewer

JHromadka
VisorCentral Staff

Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Texan in Calgary for a while
Posts: 1361

Discuss your comments on the new PDF viewer here.

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James Hromadka
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09-07-2000 09:33 PM

miradu
TreoCentral Staff

Registered: May 2000
Location: St. Paul, MN
Posts: 1429

PDF is priporitory right?
We should find an open source standerd for viewing fiels on a palm.

-miradu2000

a VC article a day keeps the boredom away

09-07-2000 09:44 PM

VTL
Member

Registered: Apr 2000
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 604

James:

Are you planning to do a review of this product? I've got AportisDoc, which is free to non-commercial users. It works fine, but you lose the formating and other graphics capability. The new viewer sounds great, but it's not free (I think it was around $25 when I checked), and there's no trial version that I could see.

09-08-2000 12:24 AM

Gameboy70
Member

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018

quote:
Originally posted by miradu2000 PDF is priporitory right?
We should find an open source standerd for viewing fiels on a palm.

Two open source file formats that might do the trick are the W3C's .svg and Macromedia's .swf (the company open sourced it over a year ago). Both are scalable vector graphic formats.

But to read .pdf's, you'd have to reverse-engineer that file format rather than reinvent the wheel with .svg or .swf. I think there's a GNU PDF reader for *nix (and maybe even Win32), but porting it to the Palm would be no small amount of work.

09-08-2000 01:27 AM

miradu
TreoCentral Staff

Registered: May 2000
Location: St. Paul, MN
Posts: 1429

Thank You gameboy. I do have the linux GPL PDF reader, and stuff. but one of my big concerns, is not viewing, but CREATING. Adobe charges like 100 dollars for the simplest PDF creation. Hmm I though Vetor graphics were for Animation. I should learn more

-miradu2000
A VC article a day keeps the boredom away

09-08-2000 02:06 AM

BEN
Member

Registered: Feb 2000
Location:
Posts: 638

quote:
Originally posted by miradu2000
Thank You gameboy. I do have the linux GPL PDF reader, and stuff. but one of my big concerns, is not viewing, but CREATING. Adobe charges like 100 dollars for the simplest PDF creation. Hmm I though Vetor graphics were for Animation. I should learn more

-miradu2000
A VC article a day keeps the boredom away

The problem is that not many other people are going to be able to, or want to read your files if you use a different program to creat it than PDF. I personally would be willing to try out new technologies, but alot of other people arn't so open. But...if you want to use the files for yourself, then go for it.
BEN

09-08-2000 02:50 AM

Gameboy70
Member

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018

quote:
Originally posted by miradu2000 Thank You gameboy. I do have the linux GPL PDF reader, and stuff. but one of my big concerns, is not viewing, but CREATING. Adobe charges like 100 dollars for the simplest PDF creation. Hmm I though Vetor graphics were for Animation. I should learn more

Animation is only one feature of scalable vector graphics. The key advantage of vector graphics technologies (like PostScript) is that, unlike bitmapped graphics, images can be scaled to size without changing the file size. If there is indeed a GLP'ed PDF reader, then I can't see why it wouldn't be possible to take the code for the filter and figure out how to create an authoring tool out of it.

But then you have a problem: the old "It's just a simple matter of programming" clich� (translation: easier said than done). Another problem is that Adobe's pretty hardcore about on IP issues. They sued Macromedia for over a GUI issue (GUI patents are even more ridiculous than 1-Click Ordering). If Acrobat technology is patented, as I presume it is, then the GPL won't shield you from litigation -- as the recent ruling on DeCSS demonstrates.

09-08-2000 08:39 AM

nwhitfield
Member

Registered: Feb 2000
Location: London, UK
Posts: 92

Open source is all very well...

quote:
Originally posted by miradu2000
We should find an open source standerd for viewing fiels on a palm.

While I'm sure that's a terribly noble view, let's join the real world here, eh?

There are lots of files out there with important information in PDF format - technical support information, user guides, government reports and plenty more things.

Even the text of the Northern Ireland peace agreement is available as a full colour PDF from the web site.

Frankly, if someone's producing a PDF reader for PalmOS that can cope with documents like that, including their graphics, I think that should be applauded.

There are plenty of other ways to read documents on your Visor if you don't want to use anything proprietary. Personally, I want access to some of those documents, and while I think open source is a great idea, I'm also a realist. I really don't think you're going to get the Northern Ireland office, or countless companies around the world to produce documents in a minority format for PalmOS any time soon.

Nigel.

09-08-2000 09:02 AM

Gameboy70
Member

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018

The superobjective should be to create an open source authoring tool for PDFs in general, not for the Palm in particular. Obviously, nobody needs to author PDFs on a Palm! So that's two separate projects: create a open source PDF authoring tool on the PC (*nix, Win32, Mac, BeOS), and port the existing open source PDF reader to the Palm.

I'm don't think that all software needs to be free, but I can appreciate the need to loosen a company's monopoly on such a ubiquitous publishing format. But as I've said, Adobe's no shrinking violet when it comes to IP. If you do write the code, you'd probably have to distribute it from a foreign server, like they did with PGP.

09-10-2000 05:50 AM

nwhitfield
Member

Registered: Feb 2000
Location: London, UK
Posts: 92

PDF writing free

Well, I have a little program on the Mac called PrintToPDF which is $20 shareware. The unregistered version will certainly manage to turn my invoices into PDFs that I can email to clients without any problems.

And as the author says, he's not heard from Adobe's lawyers yet.

The PDF spec is available online at

Nigel.

09-10-2000 11:05 AM

ASPGuy
Member

Registered: Sep 2000
Location:
Posts: 18

Ansyr PDF viewer - NOT what you may think

After purchasing the Ansyr PDF viewer, I could not be more disappointed. If there is a wayto download a demo, I could not find it, so I bought it. One (1) page took 105k of memory. THAT's REDICULOUS! And don't think that you can put a pdf book on your Visor either; before relizing how much memory it would take to convert, I converted a 495 page book to pdf and it took OVER 20 MG!!! Documents to Go has the same doc at 600k in text format.

I called them and asked for my money back. I was the first to ask for my money back and they didn't know quite how to handle that, but they did credit my credit card back the amount that I paid for it.

Also, though they allow for 3 different "brightness" levels during conversion, the brightest was very dim. Very difficult to read, and the text was choppy too. Don't mean to sound down and out about this product, but be CERTAIN you evaluate teh demo before forking over that kind of money. Very disappointed.

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09-18-2000 04:48 AM

BEN
Member

Registered: Feb 2000
Location:
Posts: 638

20 megs, that's insane. Buy the Minijam just to put books on it.
BEN

09-19-2000 02:57 AM

adenoid
Member

Registered: Jun 2000
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Posts: 22

Interestingly, the PDF reader from Ansyr that runs under WindowsCE comes with a 30 day demo period. The Palm version didn't have any demo, you had to buy it first.

(Marketing?)

Thanks to ASPGuy for finding out the uselessness of this product. Sorry you had to go to such hassles.

09-19-2000 06:12 PM

adenoid
Member

Registered: Jun 2000
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Posts: 22

A Change of Heart?

Interestingly, now the Primer for Palm DOES come with a 30-day evaluation period. In my opinion, it is only useful for small diagrams. Not really worth $50.

09-28-2000 07:19 PM

ASPGuy
Member

Registered: Sep 2000
Location:
Posts: 18

Spare Me!

adenoid, CERTAINLY not worth $50.00. $50.00, think of it. . . . $50.00!!!!

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09-28-2000 07:22 PM

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