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What happened to MARS?

will789
Registered: Dec 5 2005
Posts: 9

MARS, a project to rewrite PDF as even more XML friendly, seems to have vanished? Not in 9. what happened? Also, what next?

jbfreels
Registered: Feb 19 2008
Posts: 63
WHAT? It was never a part of Acrobat 8. It's a separate download from http://labs.google.com

It SHOULD work with 9, although I have not tried it.

-jb
will789
Registered: Dec 5 2005
Posts: 9
What I meant was that I expected the new PDF format to be a feature of 9.

you may be right that the plugin will work with 9 but there is nothing on Labs about this. I think you mean Adobe labs but Google Labs is always worth a look.
leonardr
Expert
Registered: Feb 14 2006
Posts: 333
Mars continues to be an Adobe Labs technology and you will see Acrobat 9-based updates to the plugin in the coming days. In addition, Acrobat 9 does include some integrated Mars savvyness.

If you are looking at Mars, we'd love to hear about your use cases for the technology.

Leonard

Leonard Rosenthol
PDF Standards Architect
Adobe Systems

lkassuba
ExpertTeam
Registered: Jun 28 2007
Posts: 3636
An update to the [url=http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mars/]Mars plug-in[/url] with full Acrobat 9 compliance is scheduled to be released later this summer. Mars is a stand-alone plug-in for Adobe Acrobat, but Acrobat 9 will now have built-in knowledge of Mars.

Lori Kassuba is an AUC Expert and Community Manager for AcrobatUsers.com.

will789
Registered: Dec 5 2005
Posts: 9
I realise the update for 9 is now out, but my question is still why there is so little interest in this, or promotion from Adobe. The idea of an XML workflow has been around for a while. Maybe there is not really much of a problem in creating PDf as is.

Meanwhile I am interested in ePUB as a file that works with Digital Editions and the Sony Reader. (By the way I can't find guidance on why Adobe thinks anyone would use PDF or ePUB in different circumstances but maybe this is something for the users to work out) I find from the Digital Editions blog that the PDFXML inspector can be used to reveal the content of ePUB. Not suggested for editing or starting an ePUB file. But it might work. Feedbooks can create ePUB from RSS. So plan A is to put the copy in a blog and then edit later.

InDesign loses the formatting completely. something to do with CSS. Am I off topic yet?

Not sure. PDF started as a means of publishing fairly simple texts with a few graphics. The Flash stuff is all very well but not always needed for what most people currently work with.