Autodesk's View On PDF
Many blogs are reporting the NOVEDGE interview with Mary Hope McQuiston, Head of Autodesk Extended Design Group. When asked about the difference between PDF and DWF she quoted a customer by saying, "With a PDF or GIF it’s like you’re getting a brochure of the design. DWF, on the other hand, is the design.”
Nothing is further from the truth and the Head of Autodesk Extended Design Group ought to know, unless she intends to blame the ignorant customer for her statement. A PDF file can contain a precise NURBS model of the design, and that too at a fraction of the original file size. In fact this is one of the hallmarks of PDF. And putting PDF in the league of GIF is plain and simple dumb, if not malicious.
I could have understood if this was a statement made by an external PR firm who sometimes have no clue of what they are talking about. Edelman recently summed up the history of AutoCAD into one sentence and in the bargain rewrote it completely.
I wonder what Adobe has to say about this.
Nothing is further from the truth and the Head of Autodesk Extended Design Group ought to know, unless she intends to blame the ignorant customer for her statement. A PDF file can contain a precise NURBS model of the design, and that too at a fraction of the original file size. In fact this is one of the hallmarks of PDF. And putting PDF in the league of GIF is plain and simple dumb, if not malicious.
I could have understood if this was a statement made by an external PR firm who sometimes have no clue of what they are talking about. Edelman recently summed up the history of AutoCAD into one sentence and in the bargain rewrote it completely.
I wonder what Adobe has to say about this.
posted by Deelip Menezes at
8:19 PM
5 Comments:
Thank you Deelip for commenting on my interview to Mary Hope.
The sentence you quoted is not coming directly from Mary Hope but from an anonymous DWF user. Mary Hope quoted the user when I asked her to explain the differences between PDF and DWF.
By
Folini, At
9:13 PM, August 22, 2007
Yes, I already got that.
By
Deelip Menezes, At
9:21 PM, August 22, 2007
I thought Autodesk marketing stopped using the "PDF is fine for text and images" line a couple of years ago. Perhaps Ms Hope was handed an out-of-date briefing book?
By
Anonymous, At
12:07 AM, August 23, 2007
The lie I like the best is the one about how many "dwf" users there are based on some imaginary number of downloads of the "dwf reader".
By
Anonymous, At
6:26 PM, August 23, 2007
Deelip,
Thanks for setting the record straight on that one. I feel that you've been tough but fair when evaluating 3D PDF and Acrobat 3D in the past. As you pointed out, 3D PDFs can contain a lot of design data. Certainly there are differences, both pro and con, between what can be represented in 3D PDF versus DWF, but comparing PDF to GIF for brochures is not, as you pointed out, a fair characterization.
Michael Kaplan
Director of Engineering, Adobe Acrobat 3D
Adobe Systems Incorporated
By
Anonymous, At
7:08 AM, August 31, 2007
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