WWF is a modification of the

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definitio ...

PDF format for document exchange endorsed by the

World Wide Fund for Nature The World Wide Fund for Nature Inc. (WWF) is an international non-governmental organization founded in 1961 that works in the field of wilderness preservation and the reduction of human impact on the environment. It was formerly named the Wor ...

(also abbreviated WWF) Germany. The WWF format is promoted as being more environmentally friendly than other comparable document exchange formats (e.g. PDF or DOC) since documents in this format are designed to be more difficult to print. The motivation behind the use of the format is to prevent unnecessary printing of documents. The website claims that the file format will be able to be read by most programs that can open ordinary PDF files. At present, the software for creating WWF files is available for Mac OS X 10.4 and for

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

and later. An

Open Source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

equivalent is available for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

and for

and later.

Technical details

WWF files are simply PDF files with the security settings for printing set to "not allowed", and the file extension ".wwf". Thus, the inability to print the files comes from the DRM built into

Adobe Reader Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software and Web services developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The family comprises Acrobat Reader (formerly Reader), Acrobat (former ...

, which looks at a flag in the PDF to see whether printing is allowed. Other PDF readers, such as Ghostscript, may not honour the no-print flag, rendering WWF files printable.

Criticism

The initiative has been criticised for restricting users rights, being ineffective (as non-Adobe readers such as Ghostscript can print documents in the format), for violating the

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD li ...

, for being incompatible with the goals of the

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

movement and for the software contacting the WWF without the user's consent. It was criticised by WWF International director of corporate relations Maria Boulos for being "misleading" and having been launched as "a global product" despite being created by the WWF's German division without consultation with WWF International.

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.saveaswwf.com/en/home.html Graphics file formats Open formats Page description languages Vector graphics Computer file formats Digital press Environment and society