[gs-devel] PDF-A

[luke.kendall at cisra.canon.com.au]

On  6 Nov, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>  At 1:47 PM +1100 11/6/03, luke.kendall at cisra.canon.com.au wrote:
>  >Well, what I really mean is: can you use the information for any purpose
>  >you can imagine, or have they restricted its use to a few specific
>  >purposes which they approve of?
>  
>  	Here are the relevant pieces of language from the PDF 1.5 
>  specification:
>  
>  Accordingly, Adobe gives anyone copyright permission, subject to
>  the conditions stated below, to:
>  * Prepare files whose content conforms to the Portable Document Format
>  * Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in 
>  the Portable
>  Document Format
>  * Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format
>  and displays, prints, or otherwise interprets the contents

Thanks, Leonard, for taking the trouble to post that.  Given the
additional broad permission to "otherwise interpret the contents",
I no longer see any problem with its use in that regard.

Thanks also for posting the patent info.

>  The Patent Clarification can be found at 
>  <http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/legalnotices.jsp> and reads 
>  as follows:
[...]

Producing a PDF viewer for quickly displaying PDF-optimised-for-
streaming (i.e. displaying the text before the rest of the page
graphics arrives) would seem difficult however, in light of Adobe's
patent 5,860,074 
(http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,860,074.WKU.&OS=PN/5,860,074)

But that would be a problem no matter what file format was used to
achieve the purpose.

(That's just my impression from a quick skim of the patent.)

luke