Acrobat
4.0 - The Most Significant New
Features
What new feature(s) in Acrobat 4.0 do you regard as
the most significant?
There are so many great features. Acrobat has
given companies many new reasons to adopt PDF as an
enterprise-wide format standard - and that is a BIG deal.
Annotation - It's not just the mark-up tools
that are so cool, it is the things you can do with the
annotations. You can save them by user, email them,
combine them with other users' comments, summarize them.
The workgroup possibilities set the stage for large
corporate licenses for Acrobat.
Web Capture - Extremely cool but hard to
understand how it will be used initially. Adobe has
reduced any objections to implementing PDF on the web
because of HTML to PDF conversion concerns. You will
notice that one of the first demos they give when
introducing the InDesign program is that you can convert
any Quark file to it. Ease of conversion sells new
formats and programs.
Document comparison - You can compare two
versions of a PDF document directly on the screen. Great
for workgroup management and quality control.
Signatures - Digital signatures allows new
industries to adopt PDF format for broad implementations
- particularly in law, finance, and e-commerce.
Content editing - Clicking on components within
a PDF allows you to edit them in Illustrator or
Photoshop.
Copy and past text and tables - has been
expanded in this version.
Optimization settings - You can develop your
own resolution, compression and font embedding settings
optimized for each output need.
Send E-mail feature - A finished PDF can be
automatically attached to an email initiated directly
from within Acrobat.
Adobe InDesign
- Authoring for Digital
Publishing
At Seybold Seminars/Boston Adobe officially announced
the development of their new page layout program called
InDesign (code named "K2"). What is the significance of this
product?
If you think about it, Adobe has never created a
page layout program before. They bought PageMaker and
FrameMaker with all their strengths and flaws and they
worked diligently to make the fit into the Adobe family
of digital publishing tools. During this process they
have learned a great deal about the demands of the
typographic, print and document publishing industries.
But so much has changed since desktop publishing began
in earnest in the late 1980's (the WWW, for instance).
There hasn't been a fresh page layout program dedicated
to the PDF format at the level that Quark Xpress
dedicated to the Postscript format.
This vacuum needed to be filled for PDF to really take
off - and it is pretty obvious Quark was not going to
capitulate to Adobe and revamp their base code to do it
(remember last September when Quark even threatened to
buy Adobe out). Quark still hasn't released a successful
PDF filter for their product even though they promised
one over a year ago.
InDesign is a totally new approach to digital document
authoring. It looks and feels like a multi-page layout
program. In fact, Adobe clearly demonstrates that it can
easily convert any Quark Xpress file to InDesign.
But beyond that, it works with Illustrator and
Photoshop files in their native mode. You can retain and
modify all of the levels, color specs, clip paths, etc.
from within InDesign. Its modular architecture will allow
plug-in and third party software companies to develop
enhanced vertical market applications.
Plus, the image previews... aren't really. An InDesign
imported vector looks like an native vector, not just a
For Position Only screen PICT of an imported vector. Same
for imported bitmaps. The authoring experience will be so
much more intuitive and accurate. And FUN! Imagine 4000%
zoom-ins - now that's control. Just in time for HDTV
publications authoring.
InDesign has been touted as the "Quark Killer" - not a
good P.R. promotion in my mind. I prefer to call it the
"Killer AP" that will make PDF the obvious choice for all
cross-media publishing in the not to distant future.
The Future of PDF
The dream of the 'electronic office' sometimes appears
as unrealistic as it was five years ago. A lot of people are
not that interested in reading documents from a computer
screen. People almost seem to be encouraged to print out
documents. Will we see the end to the printing out of PDF
books, articles and manuals in the near future?
In the early 1980's I was a product designer in
the check printing industry. Everyone was asking the same
question then about paperless banking transactions using
credit cards and computer links to banks. Fact is, the
experts forgot one thing - human behavior. People were
used to signing checks and you couldn't coax them away
from it.
It will take at least a generation to get people away
from reading paper. I dare say there is alot more paper
in use today BECAUSE of computer "broadcasting" of
digital documents than there ever was before computers.
We are the funniest species on the planet.
Of course it doesn't make any sense. Paper is
expensive to design, modify, print, store, distribute,
file, search, and retrieve. But there is still a
preference of this generation of human animal to touch,
peruse, mark-up, and curl up with paper - not
laptops.
However, there is a paradigm shift from "print and
distribute" to "distribute and print." Corporations are
much more willing to give you a PDF and let you print it
than they are to print and distribute the documents to
you. And we will see much more of that.
Speaking for myself, I am learning to read more
on-screen and print less. Instead of filing paper
documents of my research, I have built a "PDF research
companion" website (http://www.performancegraphics.com).
I got tired of lugging my research in 3-ring binders to
my clients. I got the brilliant idea that by building a
website, I could document links in the midst of my own
written explanations, structured to reflect the hierarchy
of my inquiries. My website is a deliverable for my
consulting accounts, where they can access "just in-time"
answers to their questions for subjects I may have
researched years ago. In short, it serves me and serves
my clients, and is accessible anywhere to anybody (except
for the few embedded PDFs that I password).
Who will be using PDF in five years?
I like to make the comparison of where we are
today with where we were 15 years ago.
Fifteen years ago the first Macs introduced desktop
publishing as a bitmap world with limited fonts, coarse
tools, and not much memory. Then Adobe Postscript ushered
in a new palette of high resolution, designer fonts, and
new ways to get quality output. It profoundly changed the
publishing and printing world.
Today we have the internet - a bitmap world with
limited fonts, coarse tools, and no much bandwidth. Now
Adobe PDF format (Postscript's evolutionary descendent)
ushers in a new palette of high resolution, embedded
fonts, and new ways to output across a variety of media
from virtually every computer platform.
In five years, with DVD, HDTV, broader bandwidth, and
Adobe's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) the web and
television will look more like PDF than it does HTML
(GIFs and JPEGs).
Hold onto your hat!
PDF and Pre-Press
Issues
You said in the PurePDF article "PDF: The Best
Universal Format" that there are still some issues to be
worked out before high-end pre-press production embraces
PDF. You mentioned a couple of examples - spot color
separations and trapping. How much of a hurdle are these and
how long would you expect before the pre-press industry does
fully embrace PDF. What other alternatives do they have?
In the mid-80's the idea of the print industry
being dependent upon Postscript digital files was a gleam
in a few people's eyes but there was too much capital
invested in optical systems, unions, stripping
departments, etc. to realistically expect it to happen
within a generation. Color separations were not even
available for 5 years. Now there is hardly a stripping
department in sight - it all went digital based on
Postscript.
Now you ask if Adobe can usher the industry through
another door - PDF, Postscript's evolutionary offspring?
Believe me, the print industry can't wait for an all PDF
workflow with all the promised efficiencies and savings
that it offers.
How long? Publishing technology is evolving at a
geometric rate. If it took ten years to go from desktop
publishing to the WWW, it shouldn't take three years to
replace Postscript workflows with PDF. There are
equipment costs, manpower, and training considerations
involved, however, so there may be a reluctance to throw
out old technology even if the bottomline makes
sense.
Adobe's recently announced PressReady program is
another landmark that takes us closer to actualizing
PDF's pre-press workflow potential.
FrameMaker to PDF
CD-ROM: Xerox Case Study
You recently completed an Adobe Acrobat conversion of
46 Adobe FrameMaker books (with table of contents and
indexes) comprising over 4,000 total pages for Xerox
Corporation. The result being a single volume interactive,
cross-platform PDF for CD-ROM distribution. What new
knowledge did you gain from this project and what were the
main challenges you encountered?
What I learned was that, in yet another area,
the PDF format works. I am very fortunate to have a
variety of accounts that demand that I put PDF through
its paces. I have experience using Acrobat Capture for
paper to PDF conversions. I have ad agency accounts that
love receiving PDF proofs of the ads that I create. I get
to make presentations using nothing but Acrobat and PDFs.
I've beaten postal strikes by transmitting PDFs instead
of shipping film. I am very grateful to Adobe that PDF
provides such a strong foundation for the structure and
the future development of my business.
I knew going in how FrameMaker automatically saved to
PDF with hierarchical bookmarks and automatic linking
between the TOC and the index. But I had never used
FrameMaker before. I knew about Catalog but had never
created an index before. All the books were built in
FrameMaker for Windows and I was an all Mac producer. The
requirements specified Windows, Mac, and Unix
distribution and I had never burned a CD before. But I
knew in my gut that the format would not let me down
All the components of Acrobat (3.01) worked -
Distiller, Exchange, Catalog, Reader+Search, Forms Author
Plug-in, hyperlinks, bookmarks, the installer scripts...
everything. It didn't matter what platform I authored in
or on which platform the CD-ROM was loaded.
Parts of the process were tedious - primarily because
I refused to take chances. Half of the documents were
formatted using TrueType fonts - so I converted the style
sheets to Type 1 (using FrameMaker's Import/Format
command). I wanted to make sure that the final documents
were as consistent as possible and wouldn't foul up when
using cross-document searching in Reader+Search.
After the project was completed, I created a 20-page
technical guide documenting the steps required and it is
now an asset for my consulting business.
How *did* you get the screenshots to look good in
Acrobat?
This was a MUST on the Xerox job. They wanted
their screen shots to look and print as well as the
original output from FrameMaker - after all, the client
was Xerox. I had heard of all of the problems that
everyone has encountered making screen shots look good in
the distilling process and I was worried about the ideal
settings. Go to the archives of any PDF user forum and
you can pick up plenty of screen capture formulas.
There were about 900 screen shots in this project.
Some were Windows Metafile color files (.WMF) and others
were .TIF. In addition, just about all of them had been
scaled to a percentage of their original size! A wrong
guess would have turned the ideal job into a
nightmare.
So I "punted" - I decided to not compress them at all
and see what happened. I just turned off all of the Job
Option compression settings and "let her rip." And it
worked! Screen shots are not generally that big to start
with (black and white, 72dpi) so they really don't need
to be compressed - particularly if you are scaling them
down. The simplicity and security of leaving them
lossless more than made up for any file size savings -
and they looked beautiful. I might have worked harder on
compression if they were going onto the web but that was
not a requirement.
One problem I did have was on the MetaFiles, however.
Since I was converting on a Mac and the originals were
created on Windows FrameMaker, the Metafiles did not stay
embedded in the file. My workaround was to open all of
the Metafiles in Word (it has a Metafile filter) copy
them and paste them into Photoshop (which bitmapped some
of the .WMF vector components) then copy and pasted them
back into the original FrameMaker files. Not elegant, but
it worked. If anyone has a better idea, I'd like to hear
it.
How smoothly did the testing for Mac, Win and Unix
go?
Instead of a hybrid CD, I used the ISO 9660
standard for burning the CD-ROM. I also used the 8.3 file
name convention and all caps. You will notice that Adobe
saves all of their cross-platform CD-ROM files in all
caps and I wanted all of the files names to be
consistent.
The testing on all platforms went extremely well. One
precaution I took was to keep directory paths to a
minimum. For instance, when I created the index using
Acrobat Catalog, I put the index in the directory that it
cataloged. I did not want to risk any function failures
as a result of complicated paths.
For further information, e-mail Performance Graphics at
miller@performancegraphics.com
or visit Performance Graphics' website, "PDF Research
Companion", at http://www.performancegraphics.com.
C. Scott Miller, President of Performance Graphics, is
available for demonstrations and consultations concerning
Adobe Acrobat and Print to the Web conversion projects. He
may be reached at 818/508-5514.
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