MARS Attacks!
This post is for all those people who have avoided PDF because “if it’s not in XML, then it’s not good”, for those that think that Microsoft’s XPS is the “future of electronic paper”, and for those who won’t use anything not based on 100% OPEN STANDARDS…
Adobe announced today MARS - the Portable XML-based Document Format. The format that will give techno-geeks what they’ve been looking for in an electronic document format - based entirely on open standards.
Living inside of a ZIP archive is a collection of both custom and standard XML grammars (including a slightly extended SVG for page contents), standard image formats (JPEG, JP2K & PNG), font (Type 1, TrueType & OpenType), and other binary formats (ICC profiles, etc.).
BUT unlike some of the other options out there, it’s not just “electronic paper”! It has all of the interactive features that users of PDF have come to expect - forms, hyperlinks, annotations/markup, multimedia, etc.
Oh, and every copy of Acrobat AND Reader 8 will support it natively - just like they do with PDF today. No explict conversions necessary (unless that’s what you want to do).
Why would you use anything else?!?!
Hopefully this wets your appetite for MARS…and I plan to write more about it in the coming weeks.
NOTE: MARS is NOT a replacement for PDF - it is simply an alternative representation/serialization of the features and capabilities of PDF based on XML.
October 27th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Sounds interesting. Thanks for the info. Looking forward to reading more about it from you. Having PDF content in a text (XML) based format will open up lots of possibilities for data extraction, manipulation, etc. of the PDF.
Should be fun to work on developing tools around MARS documents, hope they also provide an API, and in more than one popular language (at least C, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby) …
Vasudev Ram
(wannabe Martian:)
November 14th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Because Mars is based entirely on open standards (XML, ZIP, etc.) we don’t need to provide ANY API! You will use the tools you already know and love to do it…
Leonard
March 23rd, 2007 at 11:41 am
Jim King has agreed to allow the Acrobat User Forum to host his presentation from the PDF University.
http://www.acrobat-services.co.uk/auf/PDFTutorial_Xplor_CL_070218.pdf
I think it offers a balanced view on PDF and Flash. So far there seems not to have been much promotion on Mars. Here in the UK there are still a lot of people interested in fairly simple documents so the idea of creating PDF from XML is worth exploring.