Making the News

Congratulations to Global Graphics - recent PR suggest they've been busy! Although I'm sure Peerless, Zoran, Monotype, Software Imaging, Artifex and others have been just as busy...

In contrast: not widely reported in the tech media is Adobe's Mars project. From the Mars FAQ:

The information in a Mars document is organized similar to a PDF document. Mars represents document information by combining standard XML, images, fonts, and color formats within a Zip-based package. Page content is represented in SVG. In Mars, the pages, images, fonts, bookmarks, and other document components appear as separate files within the Zip package. The Mars components such as bookmarks are easier to manipulate by virtue of their XML representation.

Much like a web page which consists of a number of separate files referenced by a “root” HTML file, a Mars document consists of many file packaged together in a Zip file. There is a root "backbone.xml" file that references other files in the document.

Mars looks like a significant development, but so far there's no mention on either PDFZone or PlanetPDF. Given the interest around PDF and XPS I'd have expected at least some comment from people like Karl De Abrew or Don Fluckinger.

What could explain this? My guess is that it's a consequence of most of the news being push driven, with interested parties trying to push their stuff onto the news agenda. A traditional push tool has been the press release. No press release, no news. I didn't see a press release from Adobe about Mars, so maybe that explains it. If so, perhaps blogs aren't influencing the agenda as much as people think.

Tags: xps | pdf | news | press | PR | influence | blogs