Opening PEZ files with Xojo

Is there a plugin or methodology one can use to open and import PEZ file types into Xojo?

PEZ makes files ? I only know the candy
Who knew

Never heard of Prezi until now… I suspect you’re going to have to roll your own file importer/exporter.

[quote=175784:@Norman Palardy]PEZ makes files ? I only know the candy
Who knew[/quote]

I think that Prezi is trying to replace PDF with its proprietary format.

Good luck with that.

PDF is an ISO recognized & published standard

True, but remember when wordperfect was THE Industry standard word processor

Sure
But it wasn’t a published standard that anyone could implement like PDF is

Not trying to say Prezi shouldn’t try & do it but they are fighting a long uphill battle

[quote=176017:@Norman Palardy]Sure
But it wasn’t a published standard that anyone could implement like PDF is

Not trying to say Prezi shouldn’t try & do it but they are fighting a long uphill battle[/quote]

Heck, PDF is still unsupported natively in Windows. Maybe Prezi will be next century ?

I never did understand how Adobe got away with calling it a ‘Portable Document Format’ when all of its touted portability would be useless if you didn’t have Adobe’s reader.It was a brilliant marketing strategy regardless.

They at least had / have readers for free on most platforms so if you spit out a PDF everyone could more or less read it anywhere with the same fidelity. Thats what made it portable (unlike say Word documents)
I recall having Adobe Reader on Solaris and even the OSF/1 boxes we had

In the printing industry, PDF is a real standard. I have verified time and again it produces reliable and perfectly stable documents ready for print. I cannot even begin to imagine how much work could have been thrown into that to make it perfectly cross platform and fast. In that respect it is absolutely portable.

Now Prezy may have the ambition to go after PDF and that is their prerogative, but I cannot help but to think about the proverbial amphibian who wanted to be bigger than the beef…

Especially when they do not even have the decency to publish the format of their files…

PDF was highly influenced by Adobe PostScript (which is a Turing Complete language) and started from an incredible amount of research since the '70.
I can’t imagine someone trying to replace PDF, which is now an open standard and with free royalties, with something proprietary.

Well… no. I can only imagine one doing this: Microsoft.

[quote=176279:@Massimo Valle]PDF was highly influenced by Adobe PostScript (which is a Turing Complete language) and started from an incredible amount of research since the '70.
I can’t imagine someone trying to replace PDF, which is now an open standard and with free royalties, with something proprietary.

Well… no. I can only imagine one doing this: Microsoft.[/quote]

Even them with all their might on XPS did not seem to have had more than mixed results…

I just printed an XPS document and a PDF from one of my apps that requires a very good definition. XPS has a much worse definition than PDF, in practice unusable for print.

Working with PDF each day in my main job, I can only second Michel. It took Adobe a really long time, but if the printer conforms to one of the X-Standards, you can be assured your document will print out as intended. And that was truely not always the case. It still is not the case everywhere: I sometimes build PDFs for a printing office im Malaysia that prints for one of my customers. They don’t use a PDF X protocol which puts the color profiles completely under my control, and I have to be very thorough in checking the picture profiles of images I receive from illustrators.
So I doubt many people in the printing industry would be willing to leave PDF – at least not those who remember the years before PDF/X3.

From what I see in the videos, Prezi makes nicely animated and highly resizable presentation files. But again, they would have to fight the dinosaurs. Don’t ask me why so many people use PowerPoint; using it doesn’t make fun and the results mainly look like, hm, PowerPoint presentations. Trying to establish a new standard in an almost monopolized area is quite a challenge, I would say.

Returning to PDF: If a would be granted a wish, I’d like a better Acrobat. Very recently Adobe made it Retina compatible, but not the comments list. Which did suck before, being extremely slow (and even getting ridiculously slow when you view a PDF with several hundreds of comments), and the comment tools being famous for marking the wrong places and being anything else than intuitive. Apple definitely made the better Acrobat with Preview but it lacks color profile handling and doesn’t show all types of comments. I wouldn’t change from PDF but I would surely change from Acrobat …

BTW: Did you know you can view all different kinds of files, including PDF, with an extended iOSHTMLViewer/UIWebView? I am a bit shocked to read PDF is still not built into Windows.

That is probably because since XP, Microsoft has pushed it’s own “Open XML Paper Specification” Open XML Paper Specification - Wikipedia which, as I said before is vastly inferior.

However, PDF is just as widespread in the Windows world. I personally never encountered any professional using XPS.

Things are changing. Windows 10 now comes with a build-in Reader app that can open PDF files without Adobe Reader. Problem is, it is a new API app, not a Desktop one. So the engine may not be available for Xojo apps.

Now Windows knows how to print to PDF just the same way as Mac OS X.

With some luck, the next web browser code name Spartan that is expected to come to the preview soon will natively support PDF just like Chrome and Safari.

Some of this thread is centered around the notion that Prezi is aiming to displace/replace PDF. From what I see on their site, I see no real indication of that. Where does this analysis come from?

As others have said, PDF is now a true standard throughout the printing and publishing industry. It’s fully documented, making it possible for third-parties to create conforming readers, writers, viewers, etc., and may have.

The various “PDF-X” extensions have undergone scrutiny and adoption by international standards organizations. My guess is that even if Prezi does want to supplant PDF, they have nowhere near the wherewithal to do it…

Just got Project Spartan as part of the latest build of Windows 10 Tech Preview. It does contain a built-in PDF Viewer, like Chrome. So finally, Microsoft brings built-in PDF support to it’s browser.

Of course, Spartan will not be generalized before Windows 10 be installed on a majority of machines, and even with a free upgrade from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, that will leave an awful number of people still using XP and Internet Explorer. But that is a step in the right direction.

Update : Ouch, ouch, ouch. Spartan does indeed support PDF, but since the app is sandboxed, it is incapable of displaying a local PDF file like Chrome would. And no way to drag a file over the browser to open it. Seems Chrome will remain the better option for a while …