Wisdom of the PDF Sage

As Adobe’s PDF Standards Evangelist, it was extremely important to me that Acrobat & Reader 9 supports all the various standards in which I participate - and I am quite happy to say that we’ve made Acrobat 9 the most standards-compliant and standards-aware version of Acrobat to date!  

Standards Panel

The most visible piece of this awareness is the new "Standards Panel" (image at left).  

When you open up a PDF that complies with one of the various ISO "subset" PDF standards (PDF/X, PDF/A, PDF/E), a new icon will appear in the Navigation Panels list on the left side of your screen.   It’s the PDF icon with the blue "informational ‘i’".  

Of course, an icon doesn’t really tell you anything the file itself…so, like the other icons, clicking on it will open up the full information panel (image at right). 

In the fully displayed panel, Acrobat now provides you detailed information about what standard the file claims to be conformant with (and if it really is!), what OutputIntent profile is being used, and for PDF/X, whether the file says that it has been trapped or not.

The Standards Panel isn’t just for paid Acrobat users - it also appears in Reader 9 as well, and on all OS platform (yes, Linux too!) and even when viewing PDFs in the browser.  The only difference is that in Reader or the browser, the clickable links for "Verify Conformance" and "Open Preflight" are not available as that requires the Preflight component of Acrobat Pro or Pro Extended.

In addition to information about the ISO standards, the Standards panel will also appear if your PDF contains a "Preflight Audit Trail" (more on this in a future blog entry) and provide you detailed information.  Briefly, Audit Trails are a new feature of Acrobat 9 preflight that are based on the Ghent PDF Workgroup’s Proof of Preflight specification.

Conforming Reader

All of the various ISO PDF Standards specify requirements for what a "conforming reader" should do when it is viewing a file that conforms to that standard.  Acrobat 8 offered an option (off by default!) to support PDF/A’s requirement, but with Acrobat 9 we’ve gone all the way.

Acrobat AND Reader 9 correctly implement conforming reader requirements for all ISO PDF standards - PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3, PDF/X-4, PDF/X-4p, PDF/X-5g, PDF/X-5pg, PDF/A-1, PDF/E-1 and ISO 32000.  This applies to not just viewing but also to printing as well.

One area where this is extremely important is prepress/publishing, where users of Reader will see the correct colors and overprint that users of Acrobat see!  No more issues with lack of "Output & Overprint Preview" - it works as expected!

NOTE: this may/will mean that what you saw in Acrobat/Reader 8 and earlier does not match what you are seeing in Acrobat/Reader 9 when viewing standards-complaint files.  But guess what - that’s because Acrobat 9 is now correct!

Preflight

The version of Preflight in Acrobat 9 has seen many, many improvements (I’ll write about those in a future blog as well) - but for now, I want to concentrate on it support of standards.

You can verify compliance with all of the standards that I’ve mentioned previously, and also create files conforming with all but the PDF/X-5 standards.  It doesn’t even require that you go to Preflight to do it - just File->Save As->PDF/X (or A, or E).  It doesn’t get much easier than that to make a conforming file!

So that was just a taste of what’s in store for our users of Acrobat & Reader 9 when it comes to support of the various standards.  If you’re concerned about standards compliance (and who wouldn’t want to be) - you’re going to LOVE Acrobat 9.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 9:13 am and is filed under Acrobat, Acrobat 9. 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.