[Scribus] I'm looking for a Portable Document Format (not PDF)

[Peter Nermander]

> What is needed is a document format that is designed for the easy and
> accurate exchange of documents. Sadly, Adobe are taking PDF in much same
> direction that Microsoft took the Word file-format, where frequent
> changes to the format meant that folks were forever playing version
> catch-up.

Are you talking of an editable format or a plain viewing format?

For viewing, nothing can beat a plain image format (TIFF, PNG?)

DSC-compliant postscript should be fine too, maybe SVG would be fine too.

However those formats will give you huge files.

> I am aware of SGML Document Interchange Format, but SGML seems to have
> gone out of favour. Does anyone know of a format that fits the
> requirements I've described, or could be made to?

There is a BIG difference between PDF and SGML: PDF is an "visual" file format.
It tells you how the documents is supposed to look. It's more of a graphical
format than a document format.

SGML on the other hand does not say anything about how the document looks, it's
a content oriented format.

HTML is SGML. To force a look onto HTML you need for example CSS. Otherwise you
have no control over how the document looks.

/Peter