Seybold
I spent the last three days at Seybold
SF, much of the time helping out in the Artifex
(commercial licensors of Ghostscript) booth.
A few impressions first. Apple had a huge presence - a
gigantic booth, lots of people doing demos on the machines,
etc. I like to see competition for Wintel, but on the other
hand, it's very difficult for me to get excited. Yeah, the
cube has
style, but in terms of performance it's just a 450MHz
uniprocessor. I think the cheapo dual Celeron I bought last
year for just over a thousand bucks probably outperforms it.
Linux, on the other hand, had virtually no presence. Corel
had Corel Draw 9 for Linux tucked away into a corner of
their booth, and there were a few companies doing server
stuff that just happened to use LInux, but that was about
it. This is a bit surprising to me, because Linux really
seems to have a lot to offer for graphic arts, starting with
generic server tasks and going from there.
There was a lot of XML there. This is hardly surprising, as
XML seems to be one of the big hype waves in "digital
publishing" right now.
PDF
PDF is becoming the dominant interchange format for graphic
arts documents. A great many apps on the floor were showing
much improved PDF import and export capabilities. This
includes both Adobe's own products (notably PhotoShop
6) and competitors, including the upcoming Corel Draw 10.
PDF is making a lot of money for Adobe. It's not surprising,
then, that Adobe is pulling a classic decommoditization
strategy. The PDF 1.4 spec (not yet published) has a bunch
of new stuff that it's going to be difficult for competitive
products to implement. That, of course, includes the
blending and transparency stuff that I'm implementing, but
also the ability to re-wrap text. They also showed a beta of
Acrobat 5 running on Palms and WinCE devices, including the
Compaq iPaq.
Electronic "books"
E-books were a major theme at the show, with Microsoft
massively showing off their Reader platform,
including ClearType. As should be expected from Microsoft,
it looks really good - clearly real typographers and UI
designers were involved in this product. They will probably
get a lot of users just by being so available.
I'm wildly ambivalent about ebooks. The whole concept seems
to be organized around "digital rights management." The
person who coined that phrase must have been remarkably
insensitive to miss the Orwellian overtones. Sure, I'll sign
a contract and agree to have my rights managed, and
digitally at that. Welcome to the future.
In any case, most DRM is implemented around the concept of
the "trusted client," or client software that is programmed
to respect some access policies. Adobe Acrobat, for example,
has a simple password-based scheme and rinky-dink
encryption. Quoting from the PDF book:
Note: PDF cannot enforce the document
access privileges specified in the encryption dictionary. It
is up to the implementors of PDF viewer applications to
respect the intent of the document creator by restricting
access to an encrypted PDF file according to the passwords
and permissions contained in the file
Such an approach, of course, is pretty contradictory to free
software. If free viewers are available, it is always
possible, and hopefully even easy, to comment out the if
(!password_matches) {...} section of the code, and to
distribute the result widely.
Nonetheless, it is important for authors to get paid
for their work. To the extent that free software is unable
to meet these needs, people will be drawn towards the
proprietary systems that can, and I do not blame them.
As ebooks become more popular, it is inevitable that
Napster-like trading will become widespread. I think this is
also important, as it provides a needed safety valve to
protect against those who would restrict our right to read
excessively for business reasons.
In the meantime, I find myself very much liking paper books.
Aside from the obvious issues of durability (books can and
do last over a thousand years), portability, high
resolution, high speed random access, and so on, the culture
of books has evolved an imperfect but still reasonable
balance between liberty, business, and incentive for
authors. Libraries, used bookstores, and trading between
friends are all popular, respected approaches to sharing
books.
My main complaint about paper books is that authors get far
too little cut (sound familiar?). However, self-publishing
remains a perfectly viable option. Much self-publishing is
for "vanity," ie people who pay for the printing of their
books because they're simply not good enough for real
publishers, but there are some amazing exceptions. Edward
Tufte's books are of course beautiful examples, and then
you have eccentric thinkers such as Ted Nelson
self-publication of the first edition of Computer Lib in
1974.
The document file format to end all document file
formats
I find document file formats to be an endlessly fascinating
area of study. The most important axis for categorizing
document formats is probably structure vs. presentation.
Each point on this spectrum has unique advantages and
disadvantages. The structure end brings you much more
flexibility for editing, analyzing, and adapting (for
example, reading texts aloud). The presentation end,
conversely, gives a graphic designer much more control over
the actual presentation, allowing (in the hands of a good
designer) much higher visual quality. The tension between
these goals drives much of the continuing evolution of
document file formats, and suggests that designing an
uber-format is not trivial. Certainly, we haven't seen any
good uber-format yet.
PDF has been planted firmly in the presentation camp.
PostScript was (I use past tense because it's no longer
being actively developed) even more so - it should really be
considered a graphics file format rather than a document
format. At least PDF adds text searchability and some notion
of document structure.
From a commerical point of view, there is pressure for PDF
to become an uber-format. However, nailing down the exact
formatting brings you to an unresolvable dilemma when
displaying in a small window: scale or scroll. Both are bad
choices, and both lead to a poorer user experience compared
with a more structural approach, which can reflow the text.
Now that PDF is targeting small devices, the issue has
finally come to a head. Thus, the PDF 1.4 spec has additions
to inch down the spectrum towards structuralism, and
is capable of reflowing text intended for display in
small windows. At this point, I'm not sure what they did. My
guess is that they just bolted on a structural document
format. If you reflow, you probably give up any real control
over formatting and positioning.
In any case, I'm very disappointed in the quality of the
structuralist vs presentationist discourse. Both sides tend
to talk about The One True Way. To me, this approach misses
important truths. You need to be thinking in terms of the
quality of user experience for authors, readers, and
editors, in a diverse array of contexts. For a project
Gutenberg e-text, pure structuralism is a good, reasonable
choice. For a magazine ad, anything less than pure
presentationism is probably wrong. For everything in
between, well, that's what makes life interesting :)
Even so, it's possible to make better and worse compromises.
HTML, for example, neither represents the true structure of
documents particularly well nor offers high-quality (much
less controllable) presentation. TeX has the amazing feature
that it can accurately capture the structure of the
document, yet render completely consistently on all
platforms, allowing great artistic control over layout. The
relative popularity of HTML over TeX is of course evidence
that the world is unfair.
Well, that's probably enough ranting for now.