Wisdom of the PDF Sage

This post is for all those people who have avoided PDF because “if it’s not in XML, then it’s not good”, for those that think that Microsoft’s XPS is the “future of electronic paper”, and for those who won’t use anything not based on 100% OPEN STANDARDS…

Adobe announced today MARS - the Portable XML-based Document Format. The format that will give techno-geeks what they’ve been looking for in an electronic document format - based entirely on open standards.
Living inside of a ZIP archive is a collection of both custom and standard XML grammars (including a slightly extended SVG for page contents), standard image formats (JPEG, JP2K & PNG), font (Type 1, TrueType & OpenType), and other binary formats (ICC profiles, etc.).

BUT unlike some of the other options out there, it’s not just “electronic paper”! It has all of the interactive features that users of PDF have come to expect - forms, hyperlinks, annotations/markup, multimedia, etc.

Oh, and every copy of Acrobat AND Reader 8 will support it natively - just like they do with PDF today. No explict conversions necessary (unless that’s what you want to do).

Why would you use anything else?!?!

Hopefully this wets your appetite for MARS…and I plan to write more about it in the coming weeks.

NOTE: MARS is NOT a replacement for PDF - it is simply an alternative representation/serialization of the features and capabilities of PDF based on XML.

Since the announcement of Acrobat 8, many people have been taking this opportunity to blast Adobe for their “poor treatment of the Mac OS” Acrobat user - none more vehemently than my friend John Welsh.

As a long time Mac user (bought my 128K Mac in the first 100 days they were available!) as well as a heavy Windows user (since most of my clients are), I wanted to take the opportunity to bring some facts to the table.

I’d like to start by breaking the Acrobat Professional package into 3 parts.

1. Acrobat Professional
2. 3rd party application integration (aka PDFMakers)
3. LiveCycle Designer

Taking these in reverse order, LCDesigner continues to be a Windows-only application with Acrobat 8. Some have suggested “hacks” that would enable Designer to run on Mac - I agree with John that this is NOT a real solution. I also am of the belief that Designer will NEVER show up on the Mac…but for good reasons! If you consider that the Mac users who want Designer aren’t (mostly) in “IT”, they are instead “Creative Professionals” - then I would prefer to see Adobe integrated form creation support into their CS application (esp. Illustrator & InDesign). This would address the end-goal of the user - making Acrobat forms - but in an environment that is more to their liking (since Designer is NOT “graphic designer friendly”). I say this only as my suggestion/recommendation to Adobe - I know nothing!

Next, let’s look at the situation with PDFMakers…It sucks to be a Mac user . I’ve heard all the arguments - both technical and marketing - for why their are fewer and less-functional Makers for the Mac. But I think this is a case where, while Adobe is certainly not giving Mac users a fair shake, it just doesn’t matter! The right solution for this, IMHO, is for Apple to continue to improve the built-in PDF support and for developers to start leveraging it to provide better PDFs from their own applications. Also, I think this is an excellent opportunity for 3rd party Mac developers - just as it is on Windows.

Last but certainly not least - the main application, Acrobat Professional. While the majority of the application is written in a cross-platform manner (Acrobat SDK), sitting on top of that is a native application. In the case of Acrobat 8, this is a COMPLETELY NEW Cocoa-based Universal Binary! You can’t get more “drinking the Apple Kool-Aid” then that . (FYI: Distiller 7 was also a complete rewrite as a Cocoa-based application). Within the application, there is 100% feature parity - except where the feature integrates with a specific OS platform or 3rd party application. For example, on Windows, there are commands for integrating comments into Office or communicating with MSCAPI that simply aren’t available on the Mac. HOWEVER, Mac users aren’t left out as we have Keychain integration and (limited) Services support. In addition, printing from Acrobat Mac is BETTER (faster & higher quality) than on Windows due to close integration with the CUPS printing system on Mac OS X.

Bottom line - yes, there are some things that come in the Acrobat package where Windows users are getting “more for their money”. But Mac users are NOT second class - we are getting a top notch, Mac-savvy, core application from Adobe.

Although I don’t use this feature of Acrobat 8 as much as some of the others, and since no one else has commented on it - I will!

While the average IT-type user tends to use tools such as Adobe Designer as their form design tool, most of the “Creative Pros” who are taske to create forms will instead favor the tools they know - such as Adobe InDesign. Unfortunately, there are no “form tools” in InDesign - so what to do??
Enter Acrobat 8 & the new Form Field Recognition feature!

I just open up my existing “flat” PDF, such as this printable version of the FedEx form:

I could sit there and manually add all the fields - but I have better things to do (and it wouldn’t really be a good demo!). Instead, I will go to the Forms menu of Acrobat 8 & choose “Run Form Field Recognition”.

Acrobat will process for a little (it’s VERY fast!) and when it’s done it will hilight all of the newly created fields while presenting me with a detailed report on all created fields and suggestions for what to do next.

Now, it’s not 100% perfect (at least on this form) - but it certainly is saving me a LOT of work!

Oh, and if the graphic changes, I don’t need to re-run the recognition (esp. since I’ll have already added more fields, added logic, etc.) - I just use the Replace Pages command to replace the content out from under the fields.

What would a blog entry about a new product be without a Top X list?? Well, I don’t know if these are my “Top 8″, but they are most certainly some interesting new things in Acrobat 8…and in no particular order.

1. PDF Packages. Others have written about them, but I think they are a nice solution for gathering up multiple PDFs into a single container with added “metadata” for grouping/collating.
2. Improved PDF/A support. In addition to improved compliance testing, you can also have Acrobat correct some of the simpler errors that it finds. Also, Acrobat is now the first product to support PDF/A-1a - the Section 508 version. Most important, perhaps, is that Acrobat can now function as a PDF/A compliant viewer!!!
3. Reader Enabling of Forms to SAVE! No more “If it could save, they’d call it Saver!” comments on forums. Acrobat Pro 8 users can now add the ability to Save to forms that they create - provided no more than 500 people will SUBMIT the form back to you (via paper, fax, or electronic). Thanks Adobe - this is GREAT!
4. Acrobat Connect - screen sharing & conferencing for the masses!! My only complaint - no “per-use pricing”.
5. Better organized menus & toolbars - the new task bar combined with cleaned up menus means that users can find what they are looking for, usually where they expect it! Also technical terms have been removed (where possible) in favor of common language.
6. Shared Review - multi-user review and commenting WITHOUT the complexities of a special server. My favorite part - works with Apple’s iDisk!
7. Integrated Redaction - it’s not the comprehensive tool that Appligent’s Redax is, but it will give users (in the box!) enough to make sure they don’t end up on the front page of the NYTimes.
8. Performance, Performance and Performance! Both Mac & Windows versions not only load faster, but they also work faster. Rendering/drawing, tool selection, etc. Cross the board - the app flies.

So that’s some of my favorites…Feel free to tell me yours…

So Adobe has announced Acrobat 8!

With a new Acrobat, of course, always comes the latest revisions to PDF itself. For the first time in a while, Adobe hasn’t really made too many change to the file format. Let’s take a look at the changes…

• MAJOR improvements to 3D!
• Support for 3D (via a new 3D Annot) was added in PDF 1.6 and since Adobe has gotten lots of real-world feedback about what was still missing - so PDF 1.7 addresses many of those limitations.
• Ability to annotate the 3D model
• Control of visual appearance w/o resorting to JavaScript
• Control over animated playback
• Printer Controls!
• Users have been begging Adobe for this feature for as long as I can remember…
• A PDF can now include default print characteristics including paper selection and handling, page range, copies, and scaling
• Portable Collections
• Known in the Acrobat UI as “Packages” and detailed by my colleagues.
• It expands on the existing embedded file mechanism (/Names/EmbeddedFiles) to support a variety of interesting new solutions - while maintaining backwards compatibility with Acrobat 6 & 7.
• Improvement to dimensioning of annotations
• Polyline & Polygon annotations can now have scale & measurement-aware dimensions attached to them
• More Tags for Tagging
• Interactive elements
• Table improvements
• Pagination objects such as headers & footers
• Document Constraints
• These enable a document author to specify certain criteria that must be met in order for the document to be usable in parts of a workflow.
• Signature Constraints - is the signature valid, does it contain certain DN keys, etc.
• Viewer Constraints - does the PDF viewer support and/or have enabled certain features?
• this will help authors of complex document prevent it being loaded by older (or non-compliant) viewers!

And that’s it for PDF 1.7….for now…