PDF Research3 Reasons for Acrobat Web Captureby C. Scott Miller, Performance
Graphics
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There are many reasons why features show up in programs and why some don't. REASON #1: REMOVING THE HTML LEGACY OBJECTION During their keynote address, what is the first thing that Adobe demonstrated during the introduction of InDesign? Conversion from Quark Xpress. Why? Because they wanted to eliminate the objection that most people would have to a new Page Layout program - their investment in archived Quark files. In a similar vein, Web Capture reduces the objection many people might have to employing PDFs more often in their web sites. The #1 rule in sales, make the product easy to buy - or, in this case, the format easy to convert to. REASON #2: CROSS-MEDIA APPLICATIONS The beauty of the function is the ability to take HTML pages that are NOT essentially cross-media (i.e., they print erratically) and it gives them a page structure so that they can be delivered cross-media with their links intact. If you are producing materials that are going to be distributed to laptop users this might be a neat feature. I have already produced CDs with PDF conversions of Web Captured materials because there is no reason to reinvent the documents if all they are missing is page structure. It also saves the user from having to connect to the internet to get the information. A salesman on the road is good example. Driving along in his car (or in flight) he is about to call on an account whose website he Web Captured in his hotel room the night before. No need to hook up to a phone jack because the website is right there - of the client, the latest updated sales information from his own company, stock quotes, you name it. He can even reference the info during presentations without having to sweat the reliability of the clients web hookup. REASON #3: BROWSER POLITICS AND THE W3C I also think introducing Web Capture at Seybold/Boston was a clarion call to the W3C (situated at MIT across the Charles River). HEY! We think PDF and our version of web pages with vector graphics should be taken a LITTLE more seriously when you are establishing standards for future browsers. After all, PDF is a much more stable publishing format than HTML (or was that DHTML?, CSS?, the IE4 version? Navigator version?). Adobe is taking the lead on SVG and making that loud and clear to the W3C and the publishing community. What is the #1 objection to posting PDFs on the WWW? The Viewer is a plug-in that has to be downloaded and installed. Just maybe the W3C will start requiring that all browsers should come with something like PDFViewer already installed or, better yet, built in. Wouldn't that make US happy!
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