Download Task (Pdf: Fill & Download for Free

I played around with Red Hat for awhile out of curiosity. This was when you could get a distro in a linux magazine to try out (sometime in the 90s). I stayed with Windows at the time because of software compatibility with my work and gaming. I was pretty satisfied with 95 (and later, XP). But I would periodically mess around with linux. Command line wasn't intimidating to me- I'd started with MS-DOS so it didn't seem that different- just learn some new commands (that were similar anyway).I read about Ubuntu and since I now had broadband (yay!) I decided to download it and give it a try. It is very user-friendly, very easy to install (alongside XP) so I could take it out for a spin but revert to Windows when needed. And I found as time went by I had less need to be in Windows. For my word processing and spreadsheet needs linux equivalents were developed that were more than up to the task. PDF viewers/creators? Yep, several to choose from. Audio editors that were as capable as Windows programs I'd paid for only a couple of years previously. And so on. Plus the linux programs (& OS) were not as resource hungry, so I didn't need to update my hardware to have a usable system.The one area that I think linux lags is gaming. I'm not into gaming that much now so maybe this isn't true- I'm basing this on what I read. And my experiences with WINE have been disappointing- at least for what I needed it didn't work well. But overall my needs are covered well enough I haven't booted into Windows in over a year.

That is practically impossible.When conceived by John Warnock in the late 1980s and defined in the now-famous “Camelot" whitepaper in 1990, the future PDF format was intended to serve a genuine business need that had no immediate answer at the time. That of having a self-contained cross-platform “digital printout” that would combine visual information from arbitrary sources and render onscreen and print identically anywhere on any system without relying on external resources:The concept, the format and the accompanying Acrobat app sparked a lot of interest, but once Adobe made Acrobat Reader a free download and enabled viewing in browser (defining the concept of a browser extension jointly with Netscape along the way), it really took to the sky.Since then PDF as a format grew to support a multitude of features: comments and annotations; accessibility features; content protection, encryption and access security; forms and data collection; professional printing features; interactivity, multimedia, 3D support, file attachments, robust metadata, etc. When Adobe donated PDF do ISO in 2008, it opened new horizons for the format’s adoption. I remember estimates from circa 2013 that there were over 2 bln PDF in freely indexable resources around Internet, with up to twice that amount in various corporate repositories. Since then PDF even had to branch out into a family of several related standards for document archival (PDF/A), engineering (PDF/E), professional printing (PDF/X), variable data printing (PDF/VT) and accessibility (PDF/UA) — all of them feature-based subsets of functionality from the parent PDF specification. Which in itself is under active development, having just released a major new version, 2.0. PDF is even listed by Wikipedia as an example of a de-facto standard:)As a technical product, PDF is on masterpiece level. Tasked from the outset to be future-proof, it is, AFAIC, the only document format to boast forward compatibility. Just think about it: you create a PDF document today, then find a way to transfer it on a 25yo computer with a copy of Acrobat Reader, and it opens and shows! No wonder PDF was chosen as a substrate for the ISO document archival standard to make sure a digital document archived today opens in 100 years.So, back to your question. What is it that you feel can be improved enough for tasks and features above to throw PDF off its throne? Is that original business need not yet sufficiently addressed? You serously want to beat all of that listed? I really don’t see that coming.There were several attempts, of which Microsoft’s most recent XPS challenge comes to mind. Does XPS even ring a bell now? However, at the time it seemed threatening, considering Microsoft’s resource — then a company roughly 10 times the size of Adobe. In reality, the market just doesn’t need another format for the task, PDF is coping just fine.There are areas of improvement to address, of course:PDF’s very nature of keeping the layout intact is less of an advantage in the mobile era. There are screen reflow technologies, but they need to become more mature and widespread.While PDF can support any compression method, there are more efficient alternatives for raster-only (scanned) content using the various flavours of MRC (think DjVu). Yet, this is completely at software vendors’ discretion, and some implementations are very solid already (not so great in Adobe’s own Acrobat product unfortunately). Anyway, there may be new image compression algorithms on the horizon, and PDF is well set to support any of them without even any changes to the specification.

I worked with a multi-millionaire. Being a junior staff member on the trading desk, I had a fairly broad mandate to help him with his daily tasks. However, very soon I noticed a steady mission scope creep (it began with a simple PDF attachment...). Before I knew it, I was helping him with the following tasks (specific to the internet):Upload pictures to FacebookManage Facebook friends requestsCreate Gmail filtersAssist with password resets (Gmail)Proof-read emails sent to his friends and help with email attachmentsOrganize his downloaded email attachments into appropriate foldersHe passed away almost two years ago in his sleep (he was 46), and I often recall these memories with a sense of fondness. If I can bring him back by doing all these (non-company related) work all over again, I would do it in a heartbeat.It still pains me to see his picture on the news article of his passing. News media found the Facebook profile picture I uploaded on his behalf: a happy father holding his son - his favorite picture.