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PDF is a key tool in bridging the gap between carbon-intensive paper forms and documents and the greener electronic document future. Properly created and deployed, PDF can meet a critical need in reducing both business costs and environmental impacts. That's the message of my latest article: PDF is Green Tech for your Office.
Topics:It's been a long time off, but things are finally easing for me in content-land. газобетон
Topics:Nearly four years in the making, AIIM's PDF/UA Committee Download Movies today agreed to submit their draft standard to ANSI to be submitted to ISO as an ISO NWI (New Work Item). It's the first formal step from the Working Group's document to begin the full international process.
Topics:Hard on the heels of its announcement that Google would begin to OCR and index image-based PDFs came improved support for PDFs in Google's Chrome browser. Now Google's gone and added PDF viewing support to its Gmail application.
Google released version 1.0 of their Chrome browser yesterday; it is now super-fast with PDFs.
As a PDF 'services' person who recently parachuted down into the dungeons of server software, I can report by now that there are different monsters down here. In fact, it's an entirely new level!
I've been talking to clients and others about the Reader Extensions feature in Acrobat Pro 8 and 9, and it certainly gets a lot of attention. When I bring up (as I am both honor and duty-bound to do) the facts of the Acrobat End User License Agreement (EULA), there's a profound silence. Then come the questions.
Topics:I've been reading some feedback on my earlier post about why Reader remains the Standard for PDF viewing. Some people just love to hate the big company that gives away great and reliable software for free. They are sure that they'll have little or no use for bookmarks, form-fields, JavaScript, and so many other PDF features supported in Reader.
Nope, it's all about the speed for some people. So, I decided to perform a little test.
Intel 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 4GB RAM running OS 10.4.11 and Adobe Reader 9. In other words, a fairly basic Mac.
To perform this test, I selected two PDFs at random from the web. I made sure they were large enough so the significance of the inevitable errors in my timekeeping would be minimized. Both files were downloaded to my desktop for testing purposes.
Before each test I ensured that the software (Preview or Reader) was not running.
For timing purposes, I used a digital stopwatch (on my iPhone, if you must know). The timer started on the mouse upclick and ended the moment the first page of the PDF displayed. Each file received three trials, the trial-results were averaged.
911 Commission Report
Preview: 1.9 seconds
Reader: 1.5 seconds
Hurricane Katrina Report
Preview: 1.6 seconds
Reader: 1.2 seconds
That settles that.
The installer is a big download and the application starts kinda slow - why use Adobe Reader when other free Readers are faster?
Some pan Adobe Reader because it's not as lightweight as some 3rd party options such as the Preview utility in Mac OS X. They argue that Reader is a dinosaur who's time has already come and gone.
If there are fast and free alternatives available, why does Does Adobe Reader remain the world's default PDF viewer? Is it just lethargy, or some sort of mind-control?
Hardly.
Contrarian geeks aside, any serious user of PDFs will need Adobe Reader sooner rather than later. Without a concept of "well-formed and valid" PDF, developers naturally resorted to Adobe Reader as the "standard" for the PDFs their applications create. If Reader could open, display and print their PDF, they were good-to-go.
The result, of course, is that the world is now an anarchy of junk PDFs that conform only to what 3rd party developers observed in their tests with Adobe Reader. Reader itself has become the de facto standard for PDF simply because Adobe works very hard to make sure that Reader will open almost any PDF, no matter how poorly constructed.
There are many other reasons to consider Reader, from the powerful JavaScript API to Reader Extensions, but at the end of the day, that's not why it still stands alone against the increasingly adept alternatives.
Reader remains the popular conception of PDF because only Reader is engineered to deal with the mob-scene of sloppy PDFs that inhabit the real world.
That's a claim no other PDF viewer can make.
I recently exchanged emails with a client to answer questions about how their large insurance business could take advantage of the Reader Extensions capabilities in Adobe Reader. Here's one question and my reply:
> 1. When I download the PDF can I work on it and save it while I am
> working on it in case it takes me a couple of days to complete?If you have Adobe Acrobat, sure. If only the free Reader, then no.
Absent 3rd party software, there are three solutions for Reader users:
- Adobe Reader Extensions as conferred by Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 or 9. Advantage - free with the software, super-easy to apply. Disadvantage - a licensing limit of 500 instances of the form collected, or 500 named users. Also, Acrobat-conferred Extensions do not include the specific ability to add attachments, to spawn new pages, and several other features available via the Reader Extensions Server.
- Adobe Reader Extensions as conferred by an Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions Server (LCRES). Advantage - no 500 instance/user license limits, also, the ability to add attachments (and some other nifty abilities as well). Disadvantage - the LCRES is VERY expensive (but may be negotiable for your size of implementation, call your friendly local Adobe rep). Individual PDFs with Reader Extensions, or "blessings" (as I think of them) are commercially available, but can cost thousands per form, as many of our clients know from bitter experience.
- Build your own server to provide an "online save" function for Reader users. In this model, the user submits the form to the server in order to save the data in the form. The same user can then later retrieve that form-instance from the server, complete the form, and perform a formal "submit" into the processing workflow. Advantage: This solution avoids the whole question of Reader Extensions, and offers other flexibility besides. Disadvantage: This approach requires that users have an internet connection through which to save/retrieve the form AND it requires significantly more server-side development to establish an "interim submit/restore" function on the server, not to mention the uptime requirements, etc, etc.
I'm sorry for the long-winded answer to what should be a pretty easy question. Whew! I think I'm going to post this soliloquy on my blog. It's not as if I don't hear the question often enough....
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