After OOXML, XPS

When you thought that OOXML was enough trouble, XPS comes to be talked about. Many people just ask why Microsoft decided to create a "standard" (OOXML) to something that already had one (ODF). My answer is: "why should they use what everyone uses, when they can make anyone use what they're using?". Sucks, I know. But OOXML was just a start: now I start to understand why Marcos Santos (from Microsoft) kept saying "we should look into the future". Is the future "let's replace every standard with a Microsoft format"? Seems so, considering they're now trying to make XPS an ISO standard.

Here's a nice looking table where you can easily understand what am I talking about (shamelessly copied from this post):

Feature	OOXML	XPS
Origin	Microsoft	Microsoft
Editor	Microsoft via Rex Jaeschke	Microsoft via Rex Jaeschke
Standards Body	Microsoft via MS-ECMA	Microsoft via MS-ECMA
Patents	Microsoft promise OSP	Microsoft promise CP
Duplication	ODF ISO26300	PDF ISO32000
ISO Liaisons	ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34	ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34
ISO plans	in progress	will be submitted to ISO
Restricted technologies	WMA, WMV, MP3, OLE, Binary space, Macros	HD-Photo

So, it seems that after forcing their own replacement for ODF, they're now trying to do the same for PDF. What will come next? HTML? Place your bets...

Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading

I wrote four or five times this post, and deleted it before posting. It had several different titles and different tags, but it allways sounded too harsh. So, stopping, taking deep breaths and only writing afterwords have some advantages.

You shouldn't embed PDF's on your website. Forcing users to browse PDF files makes usability approximately 300% worse compared to HTML pages. PDF is great for distributing documents that need to be printed. But that is all it's good for. No matter how tempting it might be, you should never use PDF for content that you expect users to read online. Using one of those stupid flash thingies to avoid embeding PDF's, but for the same purpose (displaying an embeded document) not only is still bad, it is in fact worse.

Thank you.

More info about this here.

Tip: Shrinking PDF's

If you want to turn your PDF file smaller you can do this:

pdfopt input.pdf output.pdf
pdf2ps output.pdf
ps2ps output.ps final.ps
ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen final.ps