June 1, 2001
Untitled
I knew there were rumblings that Adobe was working on some snarky stuff with XML and PDF. Well, here’s just a sample of the toys we’re going to be able to play with. They’ve just released a beta Save As XML Plug-In for Acrobat 5 that will take a “tagged” PDF and allow you to spit out the following ever-so-friendly data formats:
\r\* XML-1.00 without styling\r\* HTML-4.01 with CSS-1.00\r\* HTML-3.20 accessible\r\* HTML-3.20 without CSS
And, what’s this? Holy 7-bit ASCII, Batman, it’s…
\r\* Text-only!
The trick here is to be working with a PDF that has been internally tagged so that the XML plug-in can make heads and tails of the data. Even though the XML plug-in is available for both Mac and Windows, you can only create tagged PDFs using certain bits of Windows-centric software, such as Office 2000 apps and Adobe’s potentially confusing Make Accessible Plug-in for Acrobat. Yes, you can use the cross-platform Web Capture plug-in to create a tagged PDF, but I don’t see much point in converting an HTML based page into PDF just so you can save it as XML or HTML again. Oh well, it’s a start. Document portability may never be the same once Adobe has finished rolling out all their tools. It might just be possible after all.
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