PDF Editor in Ubuntu

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Fri, 29 May 2009 17:59:20 +0300
Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:

> >    Also, since a "PDF" is a clearly defined document exactly the same
> > under Windows and Linux, in theory at least an application working on
> > Windows should be duck soup to port to Linux.
> >
> 
> What? Even if the format is well documented, that does not make the
> code any easier to port. Or would you like to port Photoshop for
> me,all it's formats are well-documented as well? How about Internet
> Explorer, as HTML is pretty well documented, as is ActiveX and
> Javascript.

Not wanting to play devil's advocate here, but I guess he is right.
If Adobe wanted to "port" Photoshop to Linux it would not take anywhere
near all tens of thousands of man hours spent in writing the original
Mac version. Just like I doubt they spent as much time "writing" the
windows port, as they did the native Mac version. It's porting not
implementing ;-) If Adobe released the source code of Photoshop, I don't
think it would take 10 years for the Linux community to port it to
Linux... Many Linux softwares are ported to Windows despite having
ridiculously small resources compared to Adobe or any major
proprietary software vendor... if it took (say) 200 people to write the
original Firefox for Linux working for two years, I doubt it took 200
people and two years to port it to Windows..

"Sylpheed", the e-mail client I am using, is basically written by a
single man, yet he provides a Windows port for each and every update to
the Linux program, and it's updated regularly.

It's "just" porting. It still work of course, but for
high-level/production apps which fly above OS specific
features, it should be a small fraction of the overall developpement
time of the native version. For low level apps/utilities, of
course "porting" basically means rewritting from scratch to suit the
new OS way of doing things. But low level apps are inherently small
compared to the hundreds of mega bytes of code that high-level apps
like Photoshop, represent. So all in all, either a complete rewrite of
a very small program, or little adjustements to a massively large
app... porting times kinda converge I guess. 

C langage is the same on Windows and Linux ;-) If you have spent 3
months developping a filtering algorythm for Photoshop in C, the same
code can be used on Windows or Mac or anything. It's what high-level 
languages are for after all, mostly.


--
Vince