I was listening to Adam Christianson’s MacCast and I heard the term Metro for the first time. By golly, have I been living under a rock?! I googled (of course) for Microsoft Metro and found some good links. I won’t bother posting all of the links since you can google for them yourself.
Lots of people are wondering if Metro is a PDF-killer. I think the answer is yes and no.
From what I understand, Metro is not all about competing with PDF. While Metro could be targetted that way, I believe they developed it for other reasons which I’ll try and explain to the best of my [limited] ability.
Metro makes a lot of sense when you consider what Microsoft is doing with the rest of the platform in the Longhorn timeframe. In Longhorn, Microsoft is replacing the graphics interface which is a combination of something called USER32 and GDI. GDI is the basic interface to video hardware that lets a program draw a rectangle, fill a circle, and render text. All of this is accelerated or not, depending on the graphics hardware. USER32 is the messaging and windowing layer which defines how windows minimize/maximize, move around, how dialogs work, how edit and listbox controls work, etc..
Under Longhorn, all of this is being replaced by a new technology called Avalon. Avalon is the presentation subsystem of the larger set of new OS interfaces in Longhorn. This larger set of OS interfaces is called WinFX. Avalon defines a generic framework for rendering arbitrarily complex scalable images that get rendered in a graphics pipeline that can be easily accelerated by graphics hardware. GDI isn’t so much about that. GDI is instantaneous and micro, while Avalon is holistic and macro.
So what does this have to do with PDF? PDF is a great format for storing documents and graphics. The PDF spec is capable at describing documents of phenominal complexity. However, when you print a PDF on Windows, you have to go through GDI, which dumbs down the capabilities of PDF before these details can be communicated to the destination device. Of course, most users might not notice this. Even when you generate a PDF using Adobe Acrobat and the Distiller application, a program like Microsoft PowerPoint might support blends and transparencies, but since the PDF rendering has to go through a GDI print layer, these blends get posterized and transparencies get lost.
Metro changes all of that. Metro is both an image spec ala PDF, and a printer-friendly spooling spec. From what I understand, Metro uses the rendering language of Avalon and allows devices to acces the full fidelity of the Avalon platform. Metro can describe t he contents of a richly formatted document and instruct an output device on the best way to render it.
Metro should work with Windows XP (and Server 2003) and Longhorn if I read the Microsoft specs correctly.
If Microsoft were to compete with Adobe, they would need to write an Acrobat-like software package (and I’m not talking about the reader) and put in all of the features that Adobe has been adding for the last decade. I don’t think this is likely right away.
In fact, Metro is an awesome technology for Adobe Acrobat! On Windows, printing a document and generating a PDF via Distiller should yield an awesome PDF that has most or all of the image features of the original application. This is because Distiller will go through Metro and not GDI. Metro simply has far more rendering capability than GDI.
The last comment that I’ll make concerns Avalon and it’s capabilities. If Metro does encapsulate Avalon, you get animation and probably some user interaction capabilities. I imagine it’s like of like having a PDF document with embedded flash graphics and presentations since that’s what Avalon is all about. Now that Adobe has bought Macromedia, I expect this kind of capability to surface in PDF land, possible before Longhorn.
