March 16, 2006

Source independent

It would be really great if anyone could use their way of choice to create a document and have the same pratical result, wouldn't it? Even if some Text Processors like KOffice, OO.org and MS Office are going to adopt their versions of an open document standard, and even if in the future we'll be able to get a real standard used by the most popular Text Processors, you're still manipulating the source. What do I mean? Well, if you want to produce the same output using any possible way to produce it, you should have a standard output and not a standard input. The thing we have most approximated to that cenario is PDF, but the lack of editing PDF's support in the most popular tools makes the format quite invalid: I could bet that everyday you have more circulation of .doc files than of .pdf ones. So, what we could use is supporting PDF edition in our tools: I would like to be able to open a .pdf file in OO.org or Microsoft Word or, in my case, have a google pdf2latex tool, be able to edit it quickly, and save, having in the output a same-looking altered PDF. At this point, the only Text Processor I know that does that is KWord, and some distro's (like Fedora) have that feature disabeled (I guess they did it because of a now-solved security issue, and they "forgot" to give use back that option). But only one isn't good enough: if you're swapping files with other KWord users, then you can just swap KWord files... And, to my personal use, there's no pdf2latex tool... yet.

No comments:

Post a Comment