Duff Johnson’s PDF Perspective

Immediately following the release of Reader 8.1, I informed readers that:

The down-side [of the Kinko’s button] is that taking unnecessary partisan positions in affiliated industries and the effective denial of equivalent functionality to all users of the software can undermine the sense of ubiquity, and ubiquity is the essence of the Reader value proposition.

Adobe has now seen the light. It turned out to be an oncoming freight-train belonging to the print industry, who credit themselves as Adobe’s oldest and best customers. Result: Reader 8.1.1, sans Kinko’ button, is due in October.

Like Ted, I was hoping that Adobe would take real advantage of the hubbub and create a new, more platform-oriented feature. The timely burial of “The Kinko’s Edition” could be converted to a significant opportunity. Adobe could make a simple api available to registered printers such that PDF creators could have their own programmable buttons appear on their Certified PDFs.

The Certification mechanism could be of real help here, because Certificates could be used to unlock simple JavaScript calls for “Creator button control”. (More on the promise - and reality - of Certified PDF some other time). Kinko’s (or any other printer) could then offer a service wherein they return a PDF of every print-job with their button added to the toolbar for triggering easy reprints, account modifications or other purposes. There are all sorts of possibilities for getting more mileage out of Trusted documents in this case - as long as it isn’t hardwired to a single vendor.

For the print industry (and indeed, for the rest of us), Reader appears close to a public trust, a notion which Adobe has certainly fostered, if not directly. Such beliefs are nonetheless our own misfortune, and Adobe is entirely within its rights to do what it will with Reader. Adobe Systems is a business, and businesses get to develop and market their products as they see fit, right or wrong. Nonetheless, my hope is that Adobe takes away the following lessons from the “Kinko’s Edition” debacle:

1. Reader is a precious software franchise not only because it is free, but because it is fundamentally nonpartisan where it counts. For example, Reader will open almost any old, malformed PDF from any source (including non-Adobe sources) without drawing attention to the fact. Likewise, Reader should appear completely agnostic about print vendors unless the creator explicitly chooses otherwise.
2. If Reader itself is to be sullied with advertising, the responsibility for that glory should be placed squarely on the creator (with the help of Adobe server products, of course). We can safely say that if PDF creators had a new opportunity to add features to the Reader toolbar, they wouldn’t complain about it.
3. Reader is SO valuable that it should not be used, by itself, to generate revenue, unless that method is author-driven. The Yahoo, Google and Kinko’s deals all “sullied” the brand. There’s greater value to be found in finding ways to serve everyone equally. The toolbar should remain in the service of the platform, not the next business quarter.
4. For platform software, ubiquity and customer enablement remain the true keys of success. All “improvements” that could impact these essentials should draw suspicion, rigorous scrutiny and deep consultation with affected industries prior to implementation, far more (clearly) than has gone before. This is the price of owning such a deep and wide franchise as Reader.

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Much touted in the new Acrobat release is “Acrobat Connect“, formerly Macromedia’s Breeze.

By now, I’ve participated in several Connect “sessions” as both presenter and presentee, so I thought I’d offer a few observations.

Connect hasn’t really got anything to do with Acrobat, and I’m really unsure why Connect occupies a prominent place in Acrobat 8.0 at all. Connect is something like WebEx, with some clever interactive tweaks. The polling, chat and status facilities are good, but it’s not a trivial affair, and it’s not really about managing or using documents. It might someday benefit from being pressed into service in the “Acrobat family of products”, but that day isn’t here yet.

In the present incarnation, Connect can’t actually use PDF files except in a desktop-sharing (ie, bandwidth-intensive) mode. This simply serves to highlight the lack of any real connection between Acrobat and Connect, even though Connect is available “with” Acrobat, even allegedly “integrated” into it.

While I have certainly experienced a number of connection issues (especially with the VOIP), I understand this is not the norm. Regardless of my circumstances, in today’s world, one can’t really expect that all users have big or stable pipes, be optimized for VOIP, or have adequate speakers or microphones for their environment. Laptops suffering wireless interference is increasingly common. Adobe recommends that presenters and viewers shut down their other chat, email and other applications to allow Connect to hog the bandwidth, and further, that you shut down the Presenter’s video uplink as well. At what point wouldn’t you rather make a YouTube movie or email a PowerPoint?

Even with the current generation of the software, a carefully planned meeting using the polling, chat and other features, and POTS (Ma Bell) for audio can work well, even for remote users. Connect has real potential to be a useful conferencing system for experienced users enjoying 1st class connectivity. As presently constituted, new and infrequent users are going to stumble and fall to a degree that will deliver poor impressions when they count the most.

While Connect sessions may be easily recorded by the Presenter, disclosure of this fact should be made clear to the end-user, visually and otherwise. The Presenter should not be encumbered with the responsibility of reminding each and every attendee that “this session is being recorded”, especially if the session is interactive.

At least some who check out the Connect “offering” through Acrobat come away confused and/or a tad miffed. The general opinion seems to be that Adobe doesn’t make it clear that Connect is not actually a new feature of Acrobat, but a new service, with it’s own (again, non-trivial) fee structure.

Lastly, my accessibility creds force me to point out that there’s nothing remotely accessible about Connect - it’s a free-flowing Flash interface, and screen-readers aren’t welcome here. This will, in the long term, have to be addressed if this technology is to have a big future in government.

All that aside, I like Connect - right down to the nervous anticipation that comes from wondering if it will all fall apart midflight, or that I’ll lose the thread, or go blind from squinting at the non-resizable copy in the UI. I just wonder if it’s properly co-located with Acrobat.

In a second article for Planet PDF, I offer a frank discussion of the PDF-to-ISO move, along with (yet another) dose of unsolicited advice for Adobe Systems.

The first article offered some context for Adobe’s move. For this second piece, I discussed the question with a number of industry leaders, several of whom are quoted. I also asked Adobe Systems to formally respond to a number of rather pointed questions. Adobe’s Director of Product Management, Sarah Rosenbaum, was kind enough to provide answers on the record.

For those with an interest in how or why the PDF Reference 1.7 will (or should) become an ISO Standard, this one’s for you.

I’ve been working on “live” files using Acrobat 8 Professional for some time now, so my initial reactions to the latest version of Acrobat are a little more seasoned.

I had this in mind during a recent interview for MacAddict magazine.

Since I went on at greater length than they could possibly print, I thought I would inflict the balance of my words on you, the helpess RSS robots (and occasional human) monitoring this Blog.

> What is your overall opinion of Acrobat 8?

The vast majority of desktop PDF users still think of Acrobat and PDF for basic create/view/print applications - if, that is, they don’t think of them collectively as just “Adobe”. With XPS looming and competition stiffening, Acrobat 8 represents a serious effort on Adobe’s part to awaken end-users to PDF’s higher uses. The redesign is new-user friendly, yet includes some neat tricks for power users that help to smooth out certain grumbles. There’s not a lot that’s strictly speaking “new” in Acrobat 8, but there are a lot of very powerful refinements, and some key additions.

> What are the most important new features for the average user? (Whomever that is.)

Oddly enough, it’s very hard to say - testimony to the very breadth and depth of the toolkit. The very first Acrobat users thought it was a prepress tool. For others, it was (and is!) a document assembly and distribution tool, or a scanning tool, or a platform for developing interactive PDF forms, or archiving documents, or commenting. There are many other equally dissimilar tasks in which some aspect of Acrobat is considered vital. “Swiss army knife” remains about the fairest overall description.

Perhaps the most important single change is the effort Adobe has put into helping newer users get more out of Acrobat than just the very basics. In Acrobat 8 most (but not all) of the tools got either a little or a lot better, depending mainly on what you need and how cleverly you use them.

That said, from my “knowledge worker” perspective, the single biggest new feature is the ability to “bless” PDFs using Acrobat Professional so the free Reader can save a user-filled form before printing or submitting it to a server.

> What are the most important new features for the vertical markets (e.g., government, manufacturing, legal, etc.) Does anything stand out in this regard?

Allowing Reader to save a form stands out in any context. Every industry uses forms, and extended this capability to Reader is BIG, without a doubt.

The legal community seems excited about redaction and bates-numbering (which surprised me, since excellent PDF redaction AND bates-numbering software from Appligent has been around for years), but government, publishers and others who want to make their PDF files more accessible (or PDF/A-1A compliant) won’t find substantially improved tagging tools in Acrobat 8.0.

Unlike Adobe, I don’t really believe traditional verticals are especially meaningful when it comes to PDF and Acrobat. There are many seemingly subtle enhancements in Acrobat 8 that offer immense opportunity for streamlining regular and ad-hoc work processes in many verticals. That’s because these are really document processes, not vertical processes.

Take the upgraded Combine Documents tool for example. Notice that this slick, easy tool now allows users to select and convert individual pages from different sources, preview the results and save that overall configuration for reuse. Workgroups large and small can continue to update documents individually, simply pushing the “easy button” in Acrobat 8 to combine all efforts together at the end of the day. Very cool. What vertical needs that? Any of them could really use it, and it’s only one such feature.

> Are there any often-requested features that aren’t in Acrobat 8? (i.e., What are the key missing pieces?)

While Extended Rights via Acrobat are great, the way they are implemented (and limited) in the EULA (End User License Agreement) makes little sense. Adobe has set a legal, financial and/or logistical cliff at the 500 user or 500 forms mark, depending. If LiveCycle is to meet the potential, Adobe needs to put (a lot) more attention into smoothing the transition from desktop to server-orientation in this area.

I was also quite disappointed to see very little improvement to the tagging tools. Ensuring that content semantics may be extracted from the document is a key aspect of making documents usable by those who must use assistive technologies to read. From accessibility to PDF/A to content reuse, automation and search-engine optimization, meaningful semantic tagging isn’t going away as an issue and there are a lot of corollary benefits to getting it right. Adobe needs to get going here.

I have to also say that it is well PAST high time that Adobe upgraded the JavaScript editor and made the power of JavaScript in PDF more accessible for the newer user, and less frustrating for the leathery Acrobat javascript gurus who can really make PDFs fly.

> Is Acrobat 8 a good value for new purchasers and upgraders?

Acrobat 8 Professional is an especially good value for new purchasers. While the application as a whole is very wide and deep, it is now laid out in a way that is fundamentally more approachable for new users. The new Combine Documents feature alone, if carefully studied and implemented, could deliver dramatic document-assembly benefits to distributed teams in almost every desk-bound organization.

Upgraders will find many improvements, even if the tonka-toy icons, unnecessary and lurid alerts and uber-prominent navigational panel cause distress. Adobe has yet to decide whether (or how) to trust Acrobat javascripters, putting a drag on the uptake of PDF in advanced forms and kiosk applications.

I was sufficiently intrigued by the Adobe Document Center to put it to the test with a real document distributed to a reasonably savvy group of people.

I’m one of those people who finds Flash more than a little overused. Once the initial buzz from the soft-focus feel of the all-Flash UI wore off, the Document Center did nothing to dispel this view.

Certainly, the process of adding new Policies and then applying them to documents was very easy. The Document Center doesn’t make it especially clear that applying Policies to documents is conducted from within Acrobat, which it is.  Create a Policy, go back to Acrobat, open your document and navigate to Advanced -> Security -> Manage Security Policies, login using your Adobe ID, select your Policy and save.  That’s it!

Less easy, as I went through version after version of my document, was retaining any meaningful picture of actual usage over time, one of the great Policy Server Promises.  I couldn’t delete revoked documents from the UI, or consolidate their statistics - perhaps that’s just a reporting issue, but it’s significant.  I also couldn’t group users, and I could never tell if or when the interface actually updated, and resorted to logging out and back in, which always seemed to do the trick. 

So, it’s a freebie interface for a freebie demo application, so I guess that’s OK.  I sure would hate to have to use it as a going concern, though.  Subtle hint.

I also found that my document recipients (and they are savvy, no kidding) were in a surprising number of cases quite stumped when confronted with a Policy Server protected document.  Part of this was due to a degree of reticence (or forgetfulness) in loyally signing up for Adobe IDs as is necessary for Adobe Document Center-protected documents.  Part of the problem was clearly also the cumbersome, Flash-heavy (why?!?) signup screen, which sapped enthusiasm further in at least two cases.  Worst, a disturbing number of reports (ie, more than 1) attested to the files consistently “crashing Acrobat”, which certainly wasn’t what anyone wants to hear.

So, I guess I have to report that thus far I’m not totally charmed, there are some definite rough-spots.  The Policy Server is undeniably an extraordinary concept, and I’d like to see much more of it. I certainly proved to my own satisfaction that I could flip a switch in Boston and watch my chosen file go “dark” all over the world, almost instantly, from Manila to Moscow.  For a second, lightning crackled between my fingertips as well.

Here’s hoping that Adobe will leave it in place past the end of the new year, or else limit freebie users to 2 protected documents at any given time… or something of the sort. Let the people kick the tires!

The ability to issue a truly embargoed document and then seamlessly (to prepared users, in any event) update it while simultaneously and effectively deleting all prior distributed copies is, quite simply, MAGIC.  Policy Server could be a real smash-hit if the execution, marketing and sales can be made to match, or even approach, the power of this product concept.

One of the new features in Acrobat 8.0 Professional garnering significant comment is redaction. This handy tool allowing users to permanently eliminate text or graphics from a PDF page. Solid, simple idea - what’s not to like?

Thus far, Acrobat 8’s redaction tool has been generally well received in principle, although a few discriminating reviewers have also noted a key concern with the method Adobe chose for redaction in Acrobat 8.0, as we shall see.

Acrobat 8 Professional is the first Adobe software to include a redaction feature for PDF, but it’s not the first. Acting on a request from Adobe, in 1996, Appligent developed and released the first version of Redax, which quickly became the definitive tool for serious redaction work on PDF files. The latest version of Appligent’s Redax works with Acrobat Standard and Professional versions 6, 7 and 8.  So you don’t need to upgrade to Acrobat 8 Professional to get PDF redaction.

To help me evaluate Acrobat 8 Pro’s new redaction tool, I wanted to find out more about how people use (or fail to use) the one PDF redaction tool that’s been available for over 10 years. I talked to Mark Gavin, founder and CTO of Appligent, to get his take. I began by asking Mark to explain the basic difference in the way Redax and Acrobat redact PDF. The answer was illuminating.

“There are two primary differences between Adobe’s redaction and Appligent’s redaction,” Gavin says. “Appligent uses an “additive” redaction methodology while Adobe uses a “subtractive” redaction methodology.”

OK, sounds technical… but redaction is redaction, right? Who cares how you zap it? This is where Gavin set me straight.

“Adobe takes an existing document and attempts to remove or “subtract” information,” says Gavin. “Appligent creates a new blank document and then “adds” the non-redacted information into the new document. Thus, the new document has never been touched by the information to be redacted.”

So, why does this matter?

Although Acrobat redacts the way you might intuitively expect (subtraction), this method is flawed. As I saw for myself almost as soon as I started redacting with Acrobat 8 Pro, I managed to “nuke” my original document by carelessly doing something that’s routine for me in other document workflows - a “Save As” operation in which I over-write my original file before I’d even realized what I was doing.  I’m not exactly the average user, so this got me thinking.

Someone who makes this mistake while redacting in Acrobat 8 Pro, will be running for the backup tapes - if there are any. Once redacted, that data is GONE. That’s a pretty harsh penalty for a easy fumble with a single keystroke. Redax’s redaction method, by contrast, makes it pretty much impossible to damage the original document.

The problem arises because Acrobat merely offers the user a ‘Save As” opportunity rather than assuming that the redacted file must be, of necessity, a new version of the document… a redacted version.  Inattentive users and system crashes are known threats  to be engineered around.  In principle, no redaction workflow should EVER put the original document at risk.

Gavin went on to explain that Acrobat’s method forces the application (and the user) to locate and remove all of the document metadata with an extra step, even custom metadata that Acrobat knows nothing about. Since Redax creates a new blank document, the only information retained is that specifically requested by the user - the text and metadata they affirmatively chose NOT to redact.

The second major difference between Acrobat and Redax, according to Gavin, is that Redax is designed to redact in a “fail safe” manner where Acrobat is not.

“If for whatever reason the document is not redacted correctly, this must be made very clear to the user that something is wrong,” Gavin says. “One of the techniques Redax employs to ensure fail safe operation is to use transparent zones to identify redaction areas. If any text or graphics remains in the redacted document it can easily be seen by the end user. On the other hand, Acrobat’s redaction zones are completely opaque. Since on occasion the Adobe software will fail to redact all the information correctly, the user won’t be able to easily see that information has been left behind.”

For these reasons, I cannot as yet recommend Acrobat’s redaction, free as it is (with the purchase price of Acrobat 8 Pro), over the fail safe and time-tested Redax.

This post is part of a series based on the “Extended Rights Manifesto“. See this post for some context.

Changes in Acrobat 8

Acrobat 8 Professional now offers three ways to “bless” a PDF with Extended Rights (”Reader-Enable”):

1. From the Advanced menu, simply select “Enable Usage Rights in Adobe Reader” to bless your PDF with Forms Save, Commenting and Digital Signatures rights. Forms-data import and export rights are also enabled (although undocumented). However, the right to spawn new pages from templates in Reader is unavailable in Acrobat 8 Professional, as is SOAP, or the capacity to bless more than one file at a time. See this post on Thom’s blog and this article by Ted Padova for more specifics.
2. “Distribute form”, available on the Forms menu or task button is a simple wizard that adds Extended Rights within a canned distribution model based on your email client.
3. “Send for Email Review” from the Comments menu or Review & Comment task button calls a wizard which adds Extended Rights for commenting only, disabling any Extended Rights.

Comment

First and foremost, Adobe deserves a lot of praise for taking the risk of moving formerly hyper-expensive “enterprise” functionality right into the desktop mainstream at a “mere” $449 a pop. What’s the catch, right? And for that matter, what’s the point of Adobe’s LiveCycle Reader Extensions Server now?

The “value add” of the Reader Extensions Server has been amended to:

1. Enabling the right of PDF files open in Reader to spawn new pages (as may be called for in on-board javascript)
2. Enabling SOAP rights (connecting PDFs to live content delivered by a webserver)
3. “Blessing” PDFs via the Batch Processor
4. And of course, everyone’s favorite: “because the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) Says So”.

Now… I’m not actually having much luck actually FINDING the EULA text anywhere in the Acrobat documentation post-installation, nor is it up on adobe.com as of this post. So the only chance you have to read it in the short-term is if you pay attention during the customary “click though” moment on installation when you are asked to accept a software licence. This time, don’t just click though, as I did.

In any event. If memory serves, the EULA limits users to either 500 end-users per form, with unlimited “instances” of the forms for each user…. or else distribution to an unknown number of users (ie, posting on a website) with a limit of 500 form-instances collected. How you figure out when you hit these limits is (it seems) up to you.

(…)

You might very well think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

The Manifesto Score Card, Article 1

November, 2006, Acrobat Professional 8.0: 8 out of 10.

The lack of the template spawning and SOAP “rights” is a real shame, and it should be possible to batch enable forms. There’s something wrong with the business model when people aren’t being encouraged to use this extraordinary functionality as much as possible. We also need more control over the messages displayed (or not) to the user when they open PDFs with Extended Rights, but these are whines about the way Rights are handled, not the Rights themselves. Even the LiveCycle server product doesn’t include (via the UI, anyhow) enough “controls” over the way Extended Rights actually manifest in PDF.

(An aside, I recently needed Extended Rights on a “kiosk” type project… not to actually allow Reader to Save, but simply to stop the !*&!@#$% warning message about how Reader “couldn’t save this form” from appearing everytime users touched a form-field!)

I also have a caveat on the EULA. Adobe’s real intent is clearly (a) lax and (b) TBD, but what bothers me more is that the idea seems kind of goofy; a barrier to business at best, a missed opportunity on the revenue side (tsk, tsk) at worst.

But that’s for another post.

Nonetheless, the simple fact is that allowing Acrobat 8 Professional to “bless” a PDF, any PDF, with most available Extended Rights, is a marvellous thing. Whole workflows can now blossom in PDF. It’s a $449 bargain based on this feature alone. Reader can Save! If you’ve bothered to read this far, you know what that means.

More Articles to follow over the next few months.

The single most important feature of Acrobat Professional 8 is a dramatic expansion in the Reader Extensions that Acrobat Professional may apply to PDF files, bestowing new “Extended Rights”. Of these, the most important such “Right” is commonly known as “Reader Save”. Within the new End User Licence Agreement (EULA) and certain other technical limitations, Acrobat Professional 8 obviates the need for expensive servers, programmatic chicanery or 3rd party products to deploy this key feature for end-users.

Simply put, Reader Save allows an Acrobat Pro user to “bless” a PDF such that form-fields may be completed and then saved by any user with the free Adobe Reader. This facility is a desirable quality for almost any fillable form, and in many cases, it is simply essential in many of the form workflows actually operating in the real world.

Before Acrobat 8, the only way to get this feature into a PDF was via Adobe’s Reader Extensions Server (ARES), five-figure “enterprise” software sold exclusively through Adobe’s direct-sales bureaucracy. ARES remains a product in Adobe’s LiveCycle lineup - more on that later.

In July, 2006, I introduced the Extended Rights Manifesto; essentially, a set of checkpoints for assessing the implementation of Reader Extensions in Adobe’s PDF management software. The idea was to offer encouragement and guidance to Adobe Systems as they pondered their strategy for moving Reader Extensions to Acrobat Professional.

In forthcoming posts, I’m going to go through the Articles of the Manifesto one by one, and “score” Adobe on the new playing field they’ve created with Acrobat 8. At the same time, we’ll doubtless think of some revisions to the Manifesto, in fact, we’ll need a whole NEW Manifesto just to keep up. Stay tuned! Along the way, please feel free to let me know YOUR thoughts on Extended Rights as well!

A lot of people sat up and took notice when Google announced their book-scanning initiative.  And not for nothing; when a company as powerful and innovative as Google says they are going to do something, it’s usually worth watching.

Per my earlier promise, I’ve been sniffing around this new Google site.  From the PDF Perspective, then, a brief review of Google Book Search.

Background

The end-product of a massive scanning project, Google Book Search is intended to eventually span millions of books.  For many works in the public-domain, Google makes complete cover-to-cover scans of the book available to users as images in an online viewer and also… you guessed it, as a PDF.

The Imaging Work

Overall, the scanning quality is average, perhaps very slightly above average.  The black and white pages from each book have are captured with JBIG2 compression, and are overlaid by a clever grayscale “screen” to produce the “patina” of an old document.  Nice touch - it keeps the file-size very low indeed while preserving at least some of the “atmospherics” of an old book.  Google managed to suppress edge-artifacts for the most part, but I’ve certainly noticed errors which should have been caught during imaging… about 1 in 300 pages or so has a boo-boo of some sort.  Not too bad, but not too good either.   For the price they are doubtless paying (and charging) for the service, I’m sure Google thinks it’s just fine the way it is.

Google’s Book Viewer

This gadget displays an image of each page in your browser window, complete with buttons to move forward or backwards through pages, or to goto a specific page. If you’re looking at the page as the result of a text-search, your search-term is highlighted, although this works less well than it should - the highlight is usually “off”.

The book’s own Table of Contents is provided via adjacent links, as is information about the publisher and current editions available in print.

The downloadable PDF files

The first thing to say about the files I’ve downloaded from Google Book Search is that they are very “lightweight” - from 8 to 20 kb per page in size for “black and white” pages. Very nice… but in their zeal to produce the SMALLEST possible PDF files, the Googlistas left something important (actually two somethings) OUT.

1. There’s no searchable text!  Users who want to locate a word or phrase are out of luck. OK, they want you to do your searching online, not offline… fair enough.  But if you were thinking about doing something offline that involves text search or extraction, you better reconsider.
2. The OCR engine used to generate the text needed to support the full-text search feature online is so-so at best.  I suspect it was selected for speed and robustness rather than quality.  In fact, I’ll go further, and guess that Google wrote their own OCR engine.  Either way, they could have done better.
3. There aren’t any bookmarks!  Users who might prefer to actually NAVIGATE a 300 page book rather than simply turn pages are also… you guessed it… out of luck.
4. Since they don’t include text, the files are (can’t be) tagged, and are completely inaccessible to disabled users.
5. File properties are left at Acrobat defaults.  Clearly the presentation of the PDF (ie, the end-user experience) doesn’t overly concern the Googlistas.

Overall, the service is, of course, free, so whining about it most likely won’t change anything.  It’s a good thing too… I recently found a fascinating “Glossary of Words Pertaining to the Dialect of Mid-Yorkshire” from the 1870s.

If I could ask them to change ONE thing, it would be this: It’s clear that Google is capturing the necessary metadata (how else do they create links for a table of contents on their site) when they scan the book, so it’s really mysterious why they don’t go ahead and slap that data into each PDF in the form of Bookmarks. Who knows?  If Google Google’s this blog post, maybe they’ll fix it!

I’m often asked “Hey, when is the PDF/UA Committee going to tell us what exactly constitutes accessible PDF is and how we get there?” I don’t have an answer for this question, yet. I can tell you that we are working on timelines now - stay tuned.

In the interim, I’d like to offer, with the kind permission of the author, Adobe Systems’ Greg Pisocky, his guide to Creating Accessible PDFs using Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional, now hosted on the Document Solutions, Inc. website. (Full Disclosure)

IMHO, Adobe themselves should host this document at their Accessibility Resource Center, because it’s the best Adobe publication on the subject to-date. Until they do, however, we’ll just try to help out a little.