Why is this the case? I would very much like to see something other than PDF get popular.
PDF is good enough. PDF also has legitimacy in terms of being an ISO standard and having acceptance by industry groups, the Library of Congress, etc.
(I have spent a lot of time staring at data formats and really I don't think PDF is that bad. It was designed to be high performance for documents in the mid-1990s and it is not really 'bloated' relative to modern computers. My 1 complaint is there is no primitive to draw a circle and it all revolves around those awful Bézier curves as opposed to something like NURBS that you can draw by 'hand'.)
Microsoft doesn't see any point in pushing a standard that will never be a standard.
A real alternative to PDF would be something opinionated that takes an entirely different approach like
My review was … harsh. I was a lot younger, and am still embarrassed about how I delivered my feedback, but it was accurate.
The PUM was giving a presentation on it, started talking about embedded font support plans. Had already interviewed the dev team (which he wasn’t aware of) asking about that. They said it wasn’t on a roadmap/ something anyone was working on. I asked him who specifically was working on it in the engineering team. Vague answer, took a note.
The VP of Windows PM had slipped in the back unbeknown to him.
He kept going with his presentation. I stopped him and asked if it had compatibility with Vista SP1 (it didn’t and I knew this because I tried it), and he goes into this whole spiel about all the work his team did to get it ready for SP1.
I turned my laptop around and tried to install it on the most current org-wide SP1 release and it failed. He said they’d look into it.
He kept going about how great public feedback had been. Stopped him again to ask when the public could try it. He said it was live on the landing page. Asked him if he was sure about that. He was emphatically certain. Asked him if he’d say that in front of his VP. Said yes. Asked him if he wanted to change his answer. Said no.
So I turned my laptop around again and low and behold it was not on the landing page or publicly available. Said something like “so you just lied in front of He was very confused and said he’d never lie to her. Told him to turn around and pointed out he literally just lied “in front” of her (did air quotes). Not sure if he was just a showboat pitchman saying things he knew were lies, or was just inept and never double checked very basic things (like SP1 compatibility or public availability) his team told him had happened. So comments here on technical deficiencies and timing are accurate, but the product unit had a terrible leader. Left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing.
It's a shame as it is a well defined format and it doesn't come with some of the junk that Adobe has included in PDF (like JavaScript support).
Interestingly it is still in use as the default spool file format for modern printer drivers in Windows.
>Not to mention that fonts are not rendered as vectors in the XPS format either; they are jagged esp. upon zooming in.
I'm not sure why that is, XPS does support embedded fonts.