Updated: September 15, 2008
PDFXML is an XML-centric representation of PDF documents that makes use of XML, ZIP packaging, and applicable image and font standards to represent document contents. Mars is the code name for the project to develop PDFXML. The format is called PDFXML and the file suffix is ".pdfxml". However, earlier releases of the plug-in used the file suffix “.mars” and this is still supported.
Support for the PDFXML file format is in a separate Acrobat or Reader plug-in, which is available for version 8.1 and 9. This plug-in has its own installer.
- Give Us Your Feedback
- System Requirements
- Installation Instructions
- Documentation
- Discussion Forum
- Reporting Bugs
- Known Issues
Give Us Your Feedback
One of the reasons for this early release is to get your comments. Did you try using the PDFXML format and did it work? What suggestions do you have? Did the plug-in install and run? If you looked at details of the file format, what do you think? Are there improvements that would make it easier to work with? Post comments or bug reports to the Mars forum on Adobe Labs.
System Requirements
To convert PDF files to the PDFXML format, Adobe Acrobat 8.1 or 9 on a supported operating system is required.
To view PDFXML files, Adobe Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader (version 8.1 or 9) on a supported operating system is required.
Installation Instructions
Installing the PDFXML Plug-in
- First, uninstall any prior version of the plug-in and Acrobat beta releases. This is very important. The PDFXML plug-in will work only with the released version of AcrobatProfessional or Reader (8.1 or 9). Note that there is an installer for Acrobat and Reader 9 and a separate installer for Acrobat and Reader 8.1.
- After installing Acrobat Professional or Reader, run the corresponding PDFXML plug-in installer and follow on-screen instructions. The downloaded files are installers. Double-click to run. On Windows systems, if BOTH Acrobat and Reader are installed, the installer will add the plug-in to both of them.
Documentation
See documentation relating to Mars ›
Discussion Forum
Join the discussion on the Mars discussion forum where you can ask questions and give us your feedback. The Mars product team will be participating as well.
Reporting Bugs
To report a bug, post on the Mars General Discussion forum with a description of the problem. Please include platform (Windows or Mac), whether it is in Reader or Acrobat, which version you are running, and the date of the PDFXML plug-in which can be obtained from menu Help (Windows) or Acrobat or Adobe Reader (Mac) : About Adobe Plug-ins, click on Mars; the date appears in the upper right.
Known Issues
Known issues in the current release of PDFXML include the following:
- The PDFXML feature is incomplete at this point in time. Feel free to experiment with it to get an idea of how it works and what the files look like. As the format is not frozen yet, any files created may not be able to be opened by subsequent Acrobat and Reader releases.
- Many, but not all Acrobat features work with PDFXML files.
- PDFXML does not support security-related features such as protection, signatures, and encryption in this release. Support for these features will appear in a later release.
- Known unimplemented areas:
- Cache and relationship extensibility
- Some types of gradients and patterns
