Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.