Carl Young’s AcroViews

Adobe President and COO Shantanu Narayen points out that Acrobat is seeing most of its growth coming from new users, not upgrades. If you are one of those, welcome to the Acrobat User Community.

PDF can be a simple representation of the printed page, or it can be a very dynamic, changing form. Creating forms is one of the most challenging tasks in the PDF world. If you are new to forms (and I see quite a few postings to the forums that suggest that), then I have some suggestions for you.

Before you draw your first form field, take a look at the articles on form design here at AUC.

For example:

Getting Started with Acrobat Forms

Adobe LiveCycle Designer or Acrobat Forms?

Nuts and Bolts of PDF Forms

Extended Form Features

Barcoded Forms in Adobe Acrobat

Digital Signatures and Adobe PDF

FormRouter’s Reader Extensions service: Extra features for fair price

If you are using the free LiveCycle Designer that ships with Acrobat Pro to create forms, I suggest you post technical questions to the Livecycle Designer forum. We do our best to answer questions here, but Adobe engineers answer questions over there.
We all started out as new PDF form designers, so don’t be afraid to speak up and ask a question. But because many of us have been there before, you will find many of your questions already answered in the articles.

The first product I ever used to create a PDF was FrameMaker. I remember creating PostScript print files and running them through an early version of Acrobat Distiller, and thinking that this PDF thing was a lot better than Display Postscript.

I’ve been using FrameMaker for almost 15 years, and for most of that time I have constantly heard rumors that the product was going to die.

Well, FrameMaker certainly has been in hibernation. The last major release was in 2002 when version 7 was released. Since then we only have seen dot releases with the latest being 7.2 in 2005. For a history of Frame, see this Wikipedia entry.

Most Adobe products are on an 18-month release cycle. With a five-year pause between major FrameMaker releases we Framers were feeling left out.

Well, take heart, FrameMaker users. Adobe has posted a FrameMaker FAQ that announces a “major new version” in in the first half of 2007. Let’s hope it is an 8 release, not just another dot release with some minor enhancements.

One interesting point in the FAQ is this hint that the next release will include “increased integration of rich media, such as 3D content and animation.” Isn’t that corporate speak for Acrobat 3D and Flash?

Something that amazes me is that Adobe Labs has some FrameMaker application packs for Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and S1000D. They even are asking for feedback!

After years of obscurity for FrameMaker it is nice to see Adobe getting serious about moving the product forward.

For those of you producing PDFs, Adobe’s announcement today that they are turning over PDF to ISO should be very good news. No longer will Adobe be the one deciding what goes into the PDF specification, but a standards body will. The situation with PDF will be like other standards, such as TIFF and JPEG. Right now Adobe owns PDF but publishes the specification for all to use.

The bad news is ISO moves more slowly than Adobe, so we are likely to see changes in the spec running behind Acrobat development.

Note: Adobe is not turning Acrobat and Reader over to ISO, just the PDF file format. Adobe will sit on the ISO committee and ask that it begin by accepting the current 1.7 specification, but after that it is up to the ISO committee to define PDF and its subsets, such as PDF/A.

The blog entries cited below have links to all the official documents.

http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr/
http://blogs.adobe.com/shebanation/2007/01/a_new_door_opens_for_pdf.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/loridefurio/2007/01/pdf_spec_releas.html
http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr/history-of-pdf-openness/

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Carl Young
www.pdfconference.com
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The closing keynote of technology sneak peeks has some real show-stopping PDF demos:

1) How about an Acrobat 3D file with a Flash background image? The 3D image was of a mobile phone. It also had Flash overlaid on the keyboard, a Flash movie that started sideways and rotated around, and finally, a Flash movie running on the phone screen. Everyone is talking about this one…

2) Tucked inside an Acrobat Connect sneak peek demo was something many may have missed…the Flash player running PDFs. No, not Flash Paper, but a PDF. It had zoom and page turning controls…

Not much PDF stuff at the keynote today, but we were treated to a surprise appearance by John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe and the father of PDF. He said he is spending his retirement building web sites for his hobbies, and he is very pleased with the Macromedia-Adobe merger. He appeared via Acrobat Connect…

Adobe showed off some very cool applications for developing mobile phone applications, including a mobile phone emulator that will run a Flash-based application at the same speed as it would work on the phone.

This is my first Adobe MAX event, and I have to say I am very impressed. The Venetian is a wonderful venue, the food is great and the attendance hit 3,200 this year, a record. It’s good to see lots of old friends here.
The keynotes on the first day were a lot of fun. The kickoff was a Blue Man group show, which was a great way to get energized for a 12-hour day.

While there wasn’t much in the hour and a half of talks that was strictly PDF, a couple of cool things did happen.

1) We saw a demo of a plug-in for Adobe LiveCycle Designer that generated a Flash form and a PDF form at the same time. Very cool.

2) The old Macromedia crowd is slowly warming up to PDF.

Ben Forta, a well known Flash and Dreamweaver evangelist, stood up and said, “I have been drinking lots and lots of PDF Kool-Aid” and indicated he’s learned a lot he didn’t know about PDF.

That PDF stuff doesn’t taste so bad, does it, Ben?

More keynotes tomorrow. I’m betting we hear more about PDF then.

As I mentioned in an E-mail blast to past participants in PDF Conference, I am encouraging everyone to attend Adobe MAX in Las Vegas in 2006.

Jo Lou and I will be at the Acrobat User Community booth in the trade show area of the Venetian. Please stop by and say hello.

In addition, I will be blogging from the show floor for those of you who cannot attend MAX.

An interview with Bruce R. Chizen, Adobe Systems, Inc. Chief Executive Officer, was published by the New York Times on Saturday. Among other things, Chizen makes it clear that we will see a new version of Acrobat by December:

One of the issues as it relates to our investors is that some of the new products we have planned will not be released until later this year and into next year. Acrobat 8 is coming to the market at the end of the year. And in the spring, we anticipate shipping the next release of Creative Suite. In it, not only are there new features in each of the individual applications, like InDesign and Photoshop, but in addition it is the first release in which we will see integration between the Adobe products and the former Macromedia products, which our customers have been asking for.

I will assume that if we are going to see Acrobat 8 by the end of the year, then we will also see new versions of Reader and LiveCycle Designer.