Re[2]: Progress on HTML 3 (acrobat, applets)

Mr. Lilley:

Regarding your email "Progress on HTML 3 (acrobat, applets)" that was passed on 
to me, I'd like to correct some points of confusion. I'm Adobe's Business 
Development Manager for Acrobat in New York.

>The *current* (version 2.0) Acrobat reader is available for:
>* Intel based PCs running MS-Windows 3.x or greater (possiblyalso NT, not sure)
>* 68k Macs (or emulation on PowerPC) with MacOS 7.x
>That is all.
>Version 1.0 is available for SunOS 4.1.3 - it does not do searching, it has
>printing problems, and is not being further developed.


The currently shipping  Adobe Acrobat Reader, version 2.1, is freely 
downloadable from our web site at  http://www.adobe.com/Software/Acrobat/

Platforms include:
       Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.1 for Windows(TM), including 3.1, NT and 95.
       Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.1 for Macintosh(TM) and Power Macintosh
       Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.1 for Sun OS, Solaris and HPUX platforms

Search is available for all of the above in our "Acrobat Reader with Search for 
CD-ROM" product or in Acrobat Exchange, available for all the above.

Also available, without indexed search or APIs, are
       Adobe Acrobat Reader 1.0.1 for SGI(TM) 
       Adobe Acrobat Reader 1.0 for DOS 

For clone viewers and other platform support, there is a UK company, 5-D, which 
makes some and has source code available. Also, GhostScript can read PDF files. 
And a Taiwanese clonemaker showed yet another at Seybold in San Francisco.

You can find Aladdin Ghostscript on ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/aladdin, and
GSview for Windows on ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/aladdin/rjl.  Or visit the
Ghostscript/GSview home page at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html.

Also, several graphics programs can import non-secured PDF: Adobe Illustrator 
5.5 and greater, Freehand, Canvas, and a Quark Xtension, Gymnast, that was also 
demonstrated at Seybold.

The Sun and HPUX platforms will continue to be supported in future versions of 
Acrobat Reader, as well as additional platforms as need dictates.

The benefits of a published cross-platform file format that supports hypertext 
constructs along with PostScript-rich page descriptions and and long documents, 
unlike HTML, has not escaped these and other developers and users.

I'm sorry that your emails to Adobe did not produce a response; perhaps it was 
an addressing problem. Please feel free to email me directly with your concerns, 
and I'll see that they are forwarded properly.


>>Anyone who has seen parallel HTML and PDF versions of the same document will
>>appreciate the enormous difference in file sizes.

Acrobat's use of compression is quite efficient, and properly crafted Acrobat 
documents compare favorably with their equivalent in graohically-rich HTML 
"documents" in a fair comparison. I'd be happy to help with any literal 
comparisons you'd like to undertake.

Gary Cosimini
gcosimin@adobe.com

Received on Thursday, 9 November 1995 14:33:30 UTC