Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

After 20 rounds of tense competition–the first National Spelling Bee finale broadcast live on network television–a 13-year-old New Jersey girl heard the pronunciation of a German word that, if she spelled correctly, would make her the 2006 national champion.

U-r-s-p-r-a-c-h-e

Admitting later that a small amount of luck had contributed to her winning performance–drawing a word she had actually studied rather than the words that eliminated the eventual third- and fourth-place contestants, which she also didn’t know–the victorious student enjoyed the spotlight in her fifth and final national spelloff. Her many years of studying words and word meanings had paid off.

This week the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee Championship takes place in Washington, D.C., opening with a 25-word, multiple-choice written test followed by two days of oral sparring. What will begin with 286 spelling champions from around the U.S. and several other countries will end Thursday evening with another two-hour, live television faceoff among the still-standing participants. Results from each round will be posted on the Bee’s website.

The site includes a variety of study resources, including a multi-part Consolidated Word List containing 23,413 unique words, compiled from previous Bees dating back to 1950. The PDF-based listings are broken down into three categories:

• Words appearing infrequently: From abacist to zymotic

• Words appearing with moderate frequency: From aardvark to zythum

• Words appearing frequently: From aardwolf to zymology

The Bee’s word panel has composed a list of more than 1,000 words to be used in the 2007 championship. One will be the deciding factor.

It’s fairly standard these days that following an industry conference, presentations by assorted speakers get posted online for download — both by attendees and by interested folks who weren’t able to get to an event. That’s been true for incarnations of various Acrobat- and PDF-related gatherings over the years, usually–but not always–providing freely available PDF-based presentations.

While easy access is the good news, there’s also a downside. Many of the presentations aren’t especially useful out of context–they’re primarily bulletpoints on which the speaker expanded during a live talk. They offer minimal value to a non-attendee, with exceptions in a limited number of cases.

Some consistently notable exceptions are Acrobat-oriented presentations given over the past decade or so by James King, PDF Architect and Principal Scientist for Adobe Systems. Not only do King’s presentations reflect his thoughtful, detailed approach to any topic he tackles and shares with audiences, but they also illustrate a savvy use of the technology and format. He doesn’t just talk about Acrobat features; he shows how they can be used wisely.

Take for example his recent talk at the Xplor conference, titled “The Future of PDF and Flash” [PDF: 4.7 MB], which of course he’s made available for download. At first glance, the PDF version appears to be a standard presentation outline of key talking points. But as long been his habit, King again makes use of Acrobat’s annotation capabilities to include the full-text of his comments for each page in the document. He explains in a note on the title page:

King starts off with a refresher on PDF — the format and specification …

with his detailed comments on various sub-topics readily available as Acrobat sticky notes …

He gradually works his way up to a couple of Adobe’s current experimental technologies–MARS and Apollo–explaining in his page-by-page annotations the status and implications of each. King writes:

“Now onto something that I personally find very interesting: MARS. I have been working on this effort personally since about 2000 and finally see the results being posted on Adobe Labs website for you all to evaluate. Of course the real work was done by some dedicated engineers on the Acrobat team. I have been asked if this work is in response to competition. The factual answer is that ever since XML was invented we have been asked why PDF couldn’t be XML. I have spent all those years telling people why it couldn’t and also trying to figure out how it could. This is our answer. The really big question that we need you to help us answer is does anyone really care what is inside of a PDF file and do they really want this kind of an XML friendly representation. It could be disruptive and confusing to have two way to serialize PDF. Well I am getting ahead of myself a little. Lets look more closely at what MARS is and isn’t.”

Download King’s presentation to find out more, and if you’re intrigued enough, accept his invitation to get involved:

“What becomes of the Adobe Labs experiment of MARS will depend a great deal on what people like you tell us,” he says. “So please play with it and tell us what you think.”

Ditto for Adobe’s Apollo project and technology.

FormRouter and Global Warming Initiatives (GWI) have launched GreenPDF.com to “educate the public on the environmental impact of printing PDF documents.” To help save trees and facilitate the reduction of greenhouse gasses, the website provides a method for uploading a PDF file to add a JavaScript-based environmental awareness notice to the document. It advises the user to consider not printing the document as a way to help save the environment.

Available for download is a presentation by James DeRosa, Director of Analysis for GWI, titled “The Green PDF: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions One Ream at a Time” [PDF: 2 MB] that details the impact of printing PDF documents and offers related statistics and suggestions, such as:

Each ream of paper not printed due to Green PDF’s equals 18.5 less pounds of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It takes only 173 reams of paper not printed of Green PDFs to save a tree and lessen atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by more than 2 metric tons.

In America, 173 reams of paper are used about every 5 seconds.

If all 700 million users of Adobe Reader decided not to print just one 10-page PDF each year, there would be three environmental effects:

ONE: Less waste due to fourteen million reams of copy or print paper not used.

TWO: 80,000 trees would not be cut down annually.

THREE: 118,000 less tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

DeRosa closes by asking all users of Acrobat and Reader to do their small part: “Next time you make a PDF, make it a Green PDF, and do your bit for a better, cleaner, greener Earth.”