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My company is developing a Java product which is now complete. Our initial target audience will be OS X, followed by Linux, then Windoze. Nearly all development and documentation work has been done using OS X. This is a commercial product and is not open source.

My question regards distributing documentation for the product. I would personally prefer creating the user/admin/developers/etc. manuals in a word processor, then formatting them into a PDF format for download with the product. The problem comes not from the format itself but rather with licensing issues regarding PDF documents created using OS X.

An individual has suggested that we need some type of Adobe license to distribute a PDF document to commercial customers and is recommending we put the documentation in an HTML format which is obviously viewable via a web browser but free of licensing constraints. I don't particularly like this idea since this will require the potential reformatting of the contents of manuals to adapt to the numerous browsers which tend to differ in their presentation formats in a way that is inconsistent between OSes and their associated default web browsers. For example, fonts under Windoze and Safari seem abnormally large compared to those used with Mozilla based variants, and I'm not really interested in doing a lot of cascading style sheets and JavaScript functions to interrogate browsers to ensure that the presentation of the manuals is at least somewhat consistent from one OS/default browser to another.

The real question at hand isn't whether to use PDF or HTML as far as I'm concerned, but what the licensing constraints are if we generate a document and then convert it to PDF for distribution. Does anyone know if there's a link somewhere on Apple's web site that can tell me whether or not it's OK to take a PDF document created using OS X tools and distribute it with a commercial product without getting into Adobe licensing?

Thanks,


Bill Wagner
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