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Adobe published complete language specifications for both PDF and
PostScript in order to encourage their widespread adoption as standards.
Worked, eh wot?
But both of these languages are relatively simple. They instruct a robot
(printer) where to put marks on the output medium (paper, film, or
monitor).
A PageMaker file, on the other hand, contains a lot more information
that enables a user to manipulate all sorts of objects, each of which
has a great many properties that are of no particular interest to anyone
other than the user and the program. (Certainly Word would have no idea
what to do with most of PM's typographic attributes, to cite one obvious
example, no matter how open the file format might be.)
PM can export graphics and text in all sorts of useful formats. But the
user has to actually pull down the File menu to figure out how to do so
;-) Also, good practice in PageMaker is to link all graphics in, rather
than actually embed them in the file. So a PageMaker file usually
doesn't even contain graphics, except for low-resolution placeholders.
In any case, what would be Adobe's purpose in making the file format
open? Does Microsoft publish the structure of their Word files? Not that
I'm aware of. Most software publishers rather prefer that you buy their
programs to read their files, don't they?
Finally, it is not altogether obvious that anyone at Adobe would
actually be able to publish a full description of the file format. Adobe
bought the company that originated PageMaker, Aldus, several years back.
I suspect the core code is as shrouded in mystery to the current
programming staff as that of Word is to the Microsoft nerds.
Dick
"McClain, Bill" wrote:
>
> I've often wondered why there are third-party products that can translate
> Adobe's PDF format used in Acrobat, but nobody's ever come up with a parser
> for PageMaker. Did Adobe open the PDF specification? If so, why not do so
> for PageMaker's files? Or was the former reverse-engineered but not the
> latter?
>
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