Mars. A planet? A Roman God? Yes, but to the PDF world it’s the name of Adobe’s XML development project.

Hosted on Adobe Labs, Mars is a wiki project, building the technology around developer feedback and reviews. The project is geared towards integrating XML workflows and regular off-the-shelf XML tools with PDF technology.

Adobe is working on an XML-based representation of PDFs and they’re calling the format a Mars Document.

And according to the information posted, the end result will be a plug-in that, when used in conjunction with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8, will allow users to create, view and interact with the documents.

A Quick Look Around

These Mars documents are, of course, similar to the PDF in looks. However, the construction will be similar to the files you get when you save a webpage. Basically, Mars documents are XML, SVG and ZIP file combined. Page structure is represented in XML, page content in SVG. Both are then bundled into a zip file consisting of separate file folders which contain other document components, such as fonts, colours, images etc.

It appears that a Mars document will be simpler to process because of this zip file structure. Being broken down into different individual components, a Mars document allows access to certain parts of the document, independent of other content.

In addition, it is said to have improved the creation and manipulation of supplementary PDF content which includes bookmarks, fonts, metadata, attachments, JavaScript, annotations etc.

With the plug-in and the latest Acrobat version, you’ll be able to save a PDF file as a Mars document and vice versa.

Mars Is Coming. . .

The plug in will be compatible with both the Professional and Standard versions of Acrobat. And if you’re interested, discussion forums are still going on. For those working with an XML-based information systems, the download will be available on Adobe Labs in December.