Regarding your email "Progress on HTML 3 (acrobat, applets)" that was passed on
to me, I'd like to correct several points of confusion. I'm Adobe's Business
Development Manager for Acrobat in New York.
>The *current* (version 2.0) Acrobat reader is available for:
>* Intel based PCs running MS-Windows 3.x or greater (possiblyalso NT, not sure)
>* 68k Macs (or emulation on PowerPC) with MacOS 7.x
>That is all.
>Version 1.0 is available for SunOS 4.1.3 - it does not do searching, it has
>printing problems, and is not being further developed.
The currently shipping Adobe Acrobat Reader, version 2.1, is freely
downloadable from our web site at http://www.adobe.com/Software/Acrobat/
Platforms include:
Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.1 for Windows(TM), including 3.1, NT and 95.
Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.1 for Macintosh(TM) and Power Macintosh
Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.1 for Sun OS, Solaris and HPUX platforms
Search is available for all of the above in our "Acrobat Reader with Search for
CD-ROM" product or in Acrobat Exchange, available for all the above.
Also available, without indexed search or APIs, are
Adobe Acrobat Reader 1.0.1 for SGI(TM)
Adobe Acrobat Reader 1.0 for DOS
For clone viewers and other platform support, there is a UK company, 5-D, which
makes some and has source code available. Also, GhostScript can read PDF files.
And a Taiwanese clonemaker showed yet another at Seybold in San Francisco.
You can find Aladdin Ghostscript on ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/aladdin, and
GSview for Windows on ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/aladdin/rjl. Or visit the
Ghostscript/GSview home page at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html.
Also, several graphics programs can import non-secured PDF: Adobe Illustrator
5.5 and greater, Freehand, Canvas, and a Quark Xtension, Gymnast, that was also
demonstrated at Seybold.
The Sun and HPUX platforms will continue to be supported in future versions of
Acrobat Reader, as well as additional platforms as need dictates.
The benefits of a published cross-platform file format that supports hypertext
constructs along with PostScript-rich page descriptions and and long documents,
unlike HTML, has not escaped these and other developers and users.
I'm sorry that your emails to Adobe did not produce a response; perhaps it was
an addressing problem. Please feel free to email me directly with your concerns,
and I'll see that they are forwarded properly.
>>Anyone who has seen parallel HTML and PDF versions of the same document will
>>appreciate the enormous difference in file sizes.
Acrobat's use of compression is quite efficient, and Acrobat documents compare
favorably with their equivalent in graohically-rich HTML "documents" in a fair
comparison.
Gary Cosimini
gcosimin@adobe.com