Coming Soon, Compatibility For Pcs
The Age
Monday July 26, 1993
IN THE beginning, God _ well, maybe it was Bill Gates _ created the DOS personal computer operating system. But as any computer user knows, the world did not stay that simple for long.
In short order, along came Macintosh, and Windows, and Amiga, and permutations of those and other systems. As a result, the computer landscape is a tower of Babel of PC formats.
Even within single classes of PCs, many programs are not compatible with each other and documents cannot be read by programs that did not create them because of multigenerational operating systems and proprietary applications.
This confusion is one of the main reasons computer mavens are constantly whining about standards. Find some sort of lowest common denominator, they argue, and more personal computers will be able to work together _ or at least be able to read each others' files.
There have been some small successes in this area. Gates's company, Microsoft Corp, has made it possible for documents created by its major programs _ such as Word and Excel _ to be read on either IBM or Apple Macintosh computers, regardless of the originating machine.
Apple has a nifty file-exchange utility that lets its Macintosh computers read disks created on IBM machines, on a limited basis. And a remarkable, if cumbersome, piece of software called SoftPC, by Insignia Solutions, can turn a high-end Mac into a virtual IBM- compatible PC, able to run almost any program or CD-ROM designed for the IBM world. It can even do Windows.
But now, a new generation of software and hardware is arriving that all but erases many of the traditional incompatibilities between different types of personal computers and programs. These breakthroughs promise to finally allow users to swap documents and even applications between competing computers with minimal fuss.
Acrobat, by Adobe Systems Inc distributed in Australia by InfoMagic, and Common Ground, by No Hands Software and distributed in Australia by Mitsui Computer, already are available; Apple's Media Tool Kit ships later this summer; and Script-X, by Kaleida Labs, a joint venture of Apple Computer Inc and IBM Corp, is due next year. And just over the horizon are computer designs that will run almost any software.
Common Ground and Acrobat both convert documents into a common format that can be read by almost any machine, at least in theory. For now, ``document" is defined as something created by a word-processing or desktop-publishing program, although Adobe is said to be preparing later versions of Acrobat that will work the same magic with multimedia presentations that combine text, sound and video.
Adobe already is shipping Acrobat for both IBM-compatible and Macintosh machines and promises versions for other platforms; Common Ground so far is Mac only, but No Hands says it will have an IBM- compatible version soon.
Acrobat or Common Ground mimic fonts, layout and other attributes to produce a document that looks and prints virtually the same whether or not it is used on a computer that has the same application, fonts, etc.
Although they have some drawbacks, demos I've seen of Acrobat and hands-on experience with Common Ground show that they pretty much live up to their claims.
I created a document in Quark XPress with several unusual fonts, converted it to the Common Ground format, and then opened it on other Macintoshes (using Common Ground's built-in document reader) lacking either XPress or many of the fonts. It looked pretty good, although Common Ground seems to have real problems with rules and underlined text.
The fonts, especially, were indistinguishable from the originals. And while you can't fiddle much with the layout of the document once it's in Common Ground, you can edit and cut and paste the text. Common Ground doesn't automatically understand multi-column documents, and in cutting and pasting picks up lines of text horizontally across all the columns _ until you employ a simple tool that tells the program to cut the page down the middle, restoring the integrity of the text.
Common Ground and Acrobat are merely the first products of their kind out the door.
Apple's soon-to-be-released Media Tool Kit claims to allow the authoring of complicated multimedia presentations for CD-ROMs that can be saved in either Macintosh or IBM-compatible formats on CD-ROMs.
© 1993 The Age