Duff Johnson’s PDF Perspective

Want a PDF education? Join the PDF gurus in Minneapolis for the Adobe Acrobat and PDF Central Conference, September 23-25, 2008. Speakers at the event include industry luminaries such as Ted Padova (author of the PDF Bible) and Thom Parker, Acrobat JavaScript guru to the gurus. Adobe Systems is sponsoring the event and several knowledgeable Adobe personnel will be on hand as well.

I’ll be presenting two sessions:

• PDF meets accessibility and Section 508, and
• PDF as Rapid Application Development platform

In addition to the numerous sessions covering all aspects of PDF, users can also sign up for pre-conference sessions with targeted information on developing PDF forms.

Those looking to fill a week with PDF and forms training should consider the BFMA’s 2008 Fall Forms Institute, held September 22 and 23 at the Mayo Clinic in nearby Rochester, MN.

When you sign up, use the code “DOCSOL” to get $100 off your registration fee!

Back in 1996 when I started Document Solutions, Inc., most of our services revolved around scanning to PDF. This background may help explain why I’m so fascinated with Adobe’s new ClearScan technology introduced with Acrobat 9.

The ClearScan concept is disarmingly simple. Starting from a scanned page, the software analyzes the image to determine which areas contain text, background or foreground images, and combinations thereof. Each type of area gets specific treatment.

The text areas are OCRed to generate searchable text. As the software proceeds through the pages it develops a library of similar characters. After the OCR is complete, this library is consolidated and converted to real, scalable fonts that are based on the characters actually found in the document.

ClearScan, in my opinion, is one of the best new features in Acrobat 9. This technology finally renders our long-standing MultiResolution service obsolete, because it delivers simply the highest-quality image-to-document conversion available today, with the best-looking output from a scan that you’ve ever seen, and the file-size is incredibly small.

Did I mention that ClearScan output is BEAUTIFUL? Would you like to see ClearScan PDF for yourself? Take a look at this example, an article originally published in 1975 by Scientific American, and processed into ClearScan PDF by DSI earlier this year.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Document Solutions, Inc. worked extensively with Adobe Engineering, assisting (ok, kibitzing) in the development of ClearScan. I’ll post details of the exciting conversion project we performed after that project is announced to the public

PDF/A (’A’ is for ‘archive’), otherwise known as ISO 19005, is the subject of my latest feature article, The Content that Endures: What to know about PDF/A, now available at Planet PDF.

Opening with the question “What happens in the year 2023, when someone has to open an Outlook PST file from 2003 to settle a lawsuit?” the article draws on numerous interviews with industry experts, including members of the PDF/A Competence Center.

In this piece, I focus on the relevance of PDF/A to current document-management and retention practices, attempting to address key questions such as:

PDF/A is already being adopted by some government agencies and other “heavyweight” organizations, but many others have barely begun to grapple with the issues PDF/A addresses, let alone consider their options.

The fact that Adobe’s PDF Reference, a document on which PDF/A depends, is now ISO 32000 should set to rest lingering concerns about the “proprietary” nature of PDF and spur interest in PDF/A.