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October 2nd, 2007, 09:50 AM
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XML vs PDF
In an effort to convince my manager that XML is a better choice for electronic Books than PDF, I need some help.
Can anyone tell me any reasons you can think of for someone to choose XML over PDF?
Thanks.
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October 2nd, 2007, 10:06 AM
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There's nothing wrong with PDF as a final delivery vehicle, but it's not a good format for maintaining your content assets, because you can never turn it into something else. Not even print on a different page size. How do you edit PDF to produce the next edition?
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference
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October 2nd, 2007, 08:49 PM
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this is interesting. do you suggest any resources I can find out more reason to use XML over PDF. I am trying to come up with 8-10 reasons.
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October 3rd, 2007, 03:49 AM
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I'm sorry, this request for strategic advice strays into territory where I ask for consultancy fees. And I would never dream of putting forward a technical strategy for a business without knowing more about the business drivers.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference
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October 3rd, 2007, 03:57 AM
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Well you're not comparing like with like, one is a method of storing data, one is a presentational format. In our company we try to store our learning materials as XML, we then create different types of presentational data using transformational techniques, XSLT and others. These create PDFs, HTML pages, spreadsheets etc. The advantage of this is you can go from XML to PDF but the opposite way, except for trivial examples is nigh on impossible. So if you want flexibility choose XML, if you're just looking to store a user friendly presentation then PDF is one way to go.
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Joe ( Microsoft MVP - XML)
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October 3rd, 2007, 05:20 AM
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Mike, to answer your question about business drivers, I am writing a sort of an executive summary. I have done my research on the web and compiled a list of reasons. I wanted to see what the Pros say about it before I move forward.
We are an educational provider for digital textbooks, and it seems we are losing a lots of business to PDF. Our digital content depends on XML.
Joe, that makes a lots of sense, however the XML content comes from PDF. The publishers supply us with PDF as the source files and we generate XML based on our DTD from that.
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October 3rd, 2007, 08:27 AM
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Well if the PDFs are designed to have extractable XML then that's slightly different, it still seems a strange way of doing things though, akin to screen-scraping HTML pages versus web services, sometimes it's the only route but it's certainly not the easiet or most maintainable.
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Joe ( Microsoft MVP - XML)
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