hi all,

What is the best open-source software to read pdf ?
What is the best open-source software to write pdf ?

Do you know a better format than pdf ?
Are postscript or latex better and easier ?

Thanks

OpenOffice.org is a full-featured office suite similar to Microsoft Office. It has export-to-PDF capability built in.

If you use KDE as your user interface (or even if you just have KDE installed) you can use the command kprinter to start a GUI that gives you the option to print to a PDF. This gives not only GUI printing capability but also PDF creation capability to any Linux program that allows you to specify the print command. Just specify kprinter as the print command!

Here's a trival example in the bash shell:

$ cat /etc/passwd | kprinter

The kprinter GUI should pop up to help you print the file.


As for viewing PDF files, the most common totally free application is ghostview. xpdf and kpdf are friendlier front ends to ghostview.

The most capable, no-cost, but licensed application to view PDF's, you can download Adobe Reader for Linux.

Hope this helps...
- TSloth

There is a problem here : cant we have a simple open-source program which can just read and write to pdf ? (not a huge thing like kde, OpenOffice or ghostview).

Do you think postscript or latex are superior to pdf ?

thanks

For the same reason there are no programs that both read and write PostScript or DVI file - because nobody wants one. The purpose of PDF is to make the document look the same everywhere. It isn't intended to be a storage format for works in progress, so there's no real need for the same program to both read and write the file.

Two points:
1) LaTeX is a document preparation system, not a page description. It doesn't make any sense to compare it to PostScript or PDF. Heck, most people convert the DVIs created by LaTeX into PostScript or PDF files before publishing them on the web or wherever, so the issue is pretty much moot anyway.
2) Supperior in what way? As far as document viewing is concerned, PDF is a much better choice than PostScript simply because of the large installed base of PDF readers. Most people have Adobe's reader or something comparable. On the other hand, how many people do you know who have a PostScript viewer installed on Windows?

There are many programs which can BOTH read and write different formats : text, doc, html, etc.
So why not with pdf ?

Is ps superior technically to pdf ?

Yes, but PDF files created this way look horrible. The fonts are jagged and the file is just badly drawn in general.

Thats why I prefer modularity :
I prefer many tiny programs that do *one thing good* at the time,
than a huge program that does *many things bad* ...

The linux development community is moving to pdf ...
this is from http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/18/2114252

Portable Document Format (PDF) is set to displace PostScript as the standard print job transfer and processing format for Linux, though Linux will maintain PostScript support for a long time to ensure backward compatibility.

You might want to check out the entire article

Pdf and PostScript belong to Adobe, who deposed many patents on it, so it is not open.

Are there any gpl or open-source equivalent solutions to pdf ?

CGM, or Computer Graphics Metafile, is an ISO-standard graphics file format that can be used to represent variable-scale graphics (as might be shown on a computer monitor) or fixed-scale graphics (as might be used for engineering diagrams, maps, etc.) which must be drawn at a particular scale. CGM allows text, vector, and raster graphic elements in the same file.

Here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Graphics_Metafile
and here:
http://www.cgmopen.org/

I haven't heard much buzz about CGM in the last 5 or 6 years.

SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, seems to be the way that browser-based graphics are going now, but going very slowly!

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics

- TSloth

CGM looks ok, under which license is it ?
Why isn't it so popular ?