Talk:Data file formats

At what level will PDF be supported please?

Adobe currently offers a version 7 demonstration with three-dimensional (3d) viewing capability.

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat3d/

The software to prepare the PDF files with 3d costs a certain sum of money yet there is a free demonstration file with a picture of a turbine engine which one can manipulate in various ways which some readers may find a useful experience. It is in a 2.4 Megabyte file.

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/pdfs/3d_pdf_demo.pdf

PDF is being supported as an ebook format. The OLPC is not intending to support everything that Adobe adds to its PDF reader. Instead, the OLPC will be using open source PDF reader software such as Evince.

Thank you for explaining that. I was thinking that PDF was an open format: is it the case that the Adobe 3d is not part of that open format, so that there is an open PDF format which is a subset of what Adobe implements? Is what is in open PDF added to from time to time is a similar manner to how what is in Unicode is added to from time to time?

There is no Open PDF format. Adobe defines what is PDF, but Open Source tools do not support all the bells and whistles that they add. In any case, there is no need for PDF 3D since there are other Open Source tools that support various 3D standards.

Please note that there are open-source tools for creating and rendering 3d objects in Python which is at the core of the OLPC software set.

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