Hi Richard,
I am taking our pdfreaders list back into CC, I hope thats ok (list is not public).
On 22.01.2012 16:03, Richard Stallman wrote:
Well, the problem is, that AFAICT there isn't /the/ version that is supported by Free Readers. The Free Readers try to handle most versions as well as they can, but don't support any relevant version fully. Recommending only a subset of the ISO (and Open) Standard, would make it a) confusing; and b) look like Free Software is inferior.
Those are valid points, but at the same time we should not steer people wrong at the practical level.
Definitely not.
Of the various versions of PDF that have names or numbers to identify them, which one comes closest to being fully supported by the latest version of evince? I am told that evince has advanced a lot.
Well from my understanding its all about poppler, the library behind evince, okular, xpdf et cetera. And from what I remember when talking with some of the devs is that it might never reach compliance with ISO 32000 (PDF 1.7).
I am not sure whether poppler supports any of the older versions completely, and since they are not very common, I would rather advertise 90% compliance with PDF 1.7 than 99% compliance with PDF 1.2.
In fact, I think we could remove the part about "You might want to promote the versions" completely and move information about that to the page that has the technical details about the different versions.
I think that is a good idea.
Which leads to another idea. I think we could use three different pages;
- A page that says "Here's how to inwtall a free PDF reader." This
is what people should link to when they link to a PDF file. I think that should be the main page of the pdfreaders.org site.
Thats the way it is right now, see http://pdfreaders.org
- A page that argues for linking to pdfreaders.org instead
of to Acroread. This is addressed to people making links to PDF files.
Thats what we are doing as part of the campaign site at fsfe.org: http://fsfe.org/campaigns/pdfreaders/pdfreaders.en.html Also we have the banners for our site at: http://pdfreaders.org/graphics.de.html
We did this seperation, because we wanted pdfreaders.org itself to be less of a campaign site and more static.
- A page that talks about what PDF versions you should use in making
documents.This is addressed to people making PDF files.
This is what we have at our "Open Standards" page on pdfreaders.org, but it could be improved with the more details and the information we talked about previously (which parts are actually supported to what degree).
They need to be different because they are addressed to different audiences. If we try to make one page serve two of these goals, it will not do both jobs as well as they could be done. This campaign is important, so it should have a the best possible page for each purpose.
I agree. Especially for 1. we have some major mid-term overhaul ideas, but maybe we should focus on doing the little changes now, so that you can integrate pdfreaders.org into your campaign.
With all the time that has gone by since I looked at the site, I don't remember which of these pages you already have, or which of these goals was the goal of the page we are now discussing. Please forgive my bad memory.
No problem, just have a look at the pages that I referenced above, and tell me what you think needs working on. I will try to setup a wiki page in the fsfe wiki with the changes we agree(d) upon, so that we can start implementing them soon.