Web design & FOSS
Front-end web technologies and Free Open Source Software.
Thursday 23 November 2006, 6:20 PM
Could SVG be the new PDF?
I am a recent convert to podcasts, having subscribed to a whole slew of them from Lullabot, as I am building a Drupal CMS site for a community radio station.
iTunes does the podcasting thing very well, for MP3s and videos. But what about PDFs? Wouldn't it be great to subscribe to a newsfeed and have the whole article, images and all, delivered to your desktop, with a tidy iTunes-like front-end for organising all those disparate documents?
A PDF reader with a built-in RSS subscription plus some way of creating PDF playlists!
Which led me to think about the nature of PDFs. The beauty of PDFs is that they are self-contained. Web pages on the other hand are not suited to wholsale distribution as they are made up of disparate elements (HTML, images, CSS, javascript etc.).
The problem with PDFs is that they are not an open standard (witness the latest feud between Adobe and Microsoft over Microsoft's inclusion of PDF printing in Office). But as I was using Inkscape yesterday, I noticed that you can embed an image.
How about using SVG instead of PDF to distribute bundled content in one file? Is the technology out there to "print" multiple page documents with embedded images to files?
iTunes does the podcasting thing very well, for MP3s and videos. But what about PDFs? Wouldn't it be great to subscribe to a newsfeed and have the whole article, images and all, delivered to your desktop, with a tidy iTunes-like front-end for organising all those disparate documents?
A PDF reader with a built-in RSS subscription plus some way of creating PDF playlists!
Which led me to think about the nature of PDFs. The beauty of PDFs is that they are self-contained. Web pages on the other hand are not suited to wholsale distribution as they are made up of disparate elements (HTML, images, CSS, javascript etc.).
The problem with PDFs is that they are not an open standard (witness the latest feud between Adobe and Microsoft over Microsoft's inclusion of PDF printing in Office). But as I was using Inkscape yesterday, I noticed that you can embed an image.
How about using SVG instead of PDF to distribute bundled content in one file? Is the technology out there to "print" multiple page documents with embedded images to files?
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