miércoles, 26 de noviembre de 2008


PDFs Are Taking Over, But Faxes Still Fly by Billions


PDF Version

ADVERTISEMENT MongoNet, backed by Adobe founders, introduces new consumer fax-to-PDF email service charged on a per-page basis.

This week, MongoNet introduced MongoScan, a consumer version of its enterprise MongoFax service. Customers fax documents to MongoNet, who in turn email PDF versions to recipients with what it calls "email cover sheets."

MongoNet’s new twist on the fax-to-PDF service is that the company doesn’t require senders to enter a fax number for the recipient, which is required by competing services such as MaxEmail. Instead, MongoNet's fax center acts as a gateway between the world's fax machines and its email network.

For a quarter a page, MongoScan does what market data shows a lot of small business owners either can't figure out or don't have time to do, says MongoNet CEO Matt Henry: Configure their multifunction printer's document scanning features.

"We're not really in the faxing business; we're in the branded PDF scanning business," says Henry, who adds that his company recently broke the one-million-user mark. "We just happen to leverage the railroad tracks laid over the last 30 years. We're putting that scanning functionality into the world's fax network."

To Henry, the Internet is the "biggest distributed printing machine ever created," a global paper-waster. His company is in the business of making money, of course, like all businesses. But it's also helping customers reduce paper consumption by turning faxes into PDFs. Furthermore, he says, some of his customers use MongoNet in lieu of FedEx and UPS overnight couriers, which further reduces a document's carbon footprint.

While "dinosaurs who still use faxes" might sound like a niche market, it's a pretty big niche—expanding government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley are actually increasing the amount of required paperwork in corporate America, and paperwork is also multiplying in the legal and real-estate sectors, he says.

People haven't yet cottoned to the various digital-signature technologies, or, as Henry jokes, purchased retinal scanners to authenticate their documents. Either way, it makes hand-signed documents represent a good share of the 650 billion pages emanating from billions of machines operating internationally Henry says, citing IDC data. Americans, he adds, account for a third of that traffic despite the country’s considerable Internet communications infrastructure—and market research shows that fax traffic is on the rise, not dwindling.

PDF remains the only viable choice for digital conversion of fax output, Henry says. MongoNet has customized a few installations of its enterprise service to create TIFF files from paper faxes for legacy transaction-management systems, but PDF is the only document format the overwhelming majority of the company’s customers want. Microsoft's XPS format, Henry says, is not yet even on his radar for support.

"[PDF is] page-oriented, and there are so many neat things you can do with it... For us, it was the clear choice after we surveyed businesses and our engineering friends," Henry says. "Our average page is around 25KB; that's not very much."

MongoNet has gotten financial backing from the likes of Charles Schwab and a list of Bay-area financial A-listers. A Silicon Valley software developer, Henry knew Adobe founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock before he'd launched MongoNet, he says, and the two signed on as investors in the company during its recent third round of funding.


Saludos, GAbyMenta

lunes, 10 de noviembre de 2008

Adobe Reader Flaw Attracts Attacks, Despite Patch

PDF Version

Hackers have begun exploiting a vulnerability affecting versions of Adobe Reader. The bug was patched earlier this week.

Hackers have painted a bull's-eye on an Adobe Reader flaw patched by the company earlier this week.
The attackers are targeting a vulnerability in Adobe Reader 8.1.2 uncovered by Core Security Technologies. According to an advisory from the SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center, attackers are using malicious PDF files to exploit the bug, which Adobe Systems patched Nov. 4. If successfully exploited, the bug could allow hackers to take complete control of a compromised system.

The bug lies in the way Adobe Reader implements the JavaScript util.printf() function, and makes it possible to overwrite the program’s memory and control its execution flow. Exploit code for the flaw has already been posted to Milw0rm.

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In addition to Reader, the bug affects Adobe Acrobat 8.1.2. Officials at Adobe advise users to either update their software to Version 9 of Reader and Acrobat, which are not susceptible to the attack, or deploy the patch.


Saludos, GAby Menta

martes, 21 de octubre de 2008



PDF: No Fast Web View or Forms Data Submission, Yet



PDF Version

The Google browser's fast with PDF, except for long documents as Google and Adobe work to iron out "byteserving" plug-in glitch.

Six weeks into the debut of the Google Chrome browser, experts have given its PDF handling generally good marks, except for one thing: It can't do Fast Web View.
Fast Web View relies on byteserving, a part of the HTTP protocol some PDF veterans might refer to as linearization. It's the document equivalent of streaming audio and video. Google Chrome, because of the way it handles plug-ins, doesn't support byteserving the same way other browsers do.

Basically, the Fast Web View setting allows a server to deliver a page of a PDF at a time to browsers who really only want to view one page—or jump around to several noncontiguous pages—of a long document and don't want to download or cache all the pages.

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When Adobe introduced "Fast Web View" in Acrobat back in the early Pentium era of dial-up Internet connections, it was a godsend. It still is a heavily used feature, as document authors upload longer, richer, graphics-heavy PDFs that sometimes take several minutes to download.

Chrome users will probably notice slowdowns when viewing long PDFs, says Duff Johnson, CEO of Appligent Document Solutions, one of the first PDF experts to uncover the glitch. Even when Fast Web View is enabled in a document, Chrome forces users to download the whole thing before viewing it.

"Streaming permits large PDFs to display after downloading the first page, which greatly enhances the user experience," Johnson says. "If a high-quality user experience is a priority, Fast Web View is simply essential when serving PDFs larger than a few hundred KB. Most PDFs posted on websites qualify."

The Acrobat team also weighed in with a technical explanation of the glitch on its Shredding the Document blog. In an email to PDFzone, Adobe PDF standards architect Leonard Rosenthol says that the company is working with Google to correct the issue.

Rosenthol went on to say that Chrome also doesn't support several other PDF features that Firefox and Internet Explorer do, such as forms submission and online collaboration.

Google issued a Chrome upgrade earlier this week that patched a few known bugs. The company continues work on a Mac version, but the public only can access the Windows side as of yet.

While Johnson's excited to see another browser making its way into the world and believes that Chrome has a shot at unseating IE from its dominating market penetration—maybe even a better shot than Firefox, which only about 20% of people use—it doesn't offer significant improvement to the PDF experience.

"Chrome seems to work OK, we've seen no other complaints to date," Johnson says. "However, I don't see it as a leap forward for PDF viewing."


Saludos, GAby Menta - SAn Acrobat

Fluckinger

miércoles, 17 de septiembre de 2008

eb 2.0 Drives Adoption of Direct-Attached Storage


Despite all the talk about iSCSI, Fibre Channel and 4/10GB Ethernet connectivity, industry experts estimate that DAS still comprises about 70 percent of the entire data storage market.

Good old direct-attached data storage, the original digital storage model that dates back to IBM's original spinning desk platter in the mid-1950s, doesn't make a lot of news these days. Like a shy boy or girl on the sidelines at a junior-high sock hop, it prefers to let other newer and fancier technologies grab attention on the dance floor.

But this oh-so-basic storage form, in fact, is what's making most of the business world go 'round. In addition to its common use in small businesses and home offices, many larger enterprises—including Web 2.0 companies—are rediscovering DAS and are starting to add it as an adjunct layer for specific mission-critical applications.

DAS is storage that is physically connected via cable or other wired connection to dedicated servers, desktops, laptops, thin clients or handheld data origination terminals.

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Despite all the talk about iSCSI, Fibre Channel and 4/10GB Ethernet connectivity, industry experts estimate that DAS still comprises about 70 percent of the entire data storage market. This, of course, includes the millions of simple, USB-attached external drives individuals use in homes or in remote corporate offices, but it also includes DAS as an integral part of a growing number of enterprise storage systems.

bye bye , GAby Menta

martes, 9 de septiembre de 2008

PDF on Google Chrome, So Far, A Shiny, Happy Experience

There may be strategic and technical reasons to dislike Google's new Chrome browser, but the way it handles PDFs isn't one of them.

We're always looking for a better widget to view PDFs more efficiently. Google Chrome might be it.

How sweet it is. Google Chrome's handling of PDFs, that is.

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Don't take our word for it, take it for a test spin. Go to the Government Accountability Office and pop off a couple of hundred-pagers on any topic you'd like, such as pork belly futures. Download some IRS forms, or open your latest credit card statement. Magnify it, poke it, prod it. Surely someone will quickly figure out how to break Chrome, the new Web browser from Google--and someone else will find a way to make it display a graphics-heavy document poorly--but it won't be easy.

Unencumbered by 15 years of bolted-on code and other historical software-engineering artifacts, Chrome tames PDF documents on the everyday, average machine, nimbly slicing through words and pictures that slow other browsers to a crawl.

Lord knows people who earn their living via work done on Windows could use a little more speed and a little less hang time. The key is, Chrome knows about Adobe Reader and Acrobat already installed on your system—which is good, considering one or both live on most of the computers on earth.

It also understands how to tap into those resources without pestering us with 50 clicks' worth of how we feel about the price of tea in China as well as how we want documents of different stripes handled when we download them.


That's the upside. The downsides, as of today:

• The different interface and slightly different look will take the technophobes among us time to get used to.

• Firefox has been neither hot nor new for years, but only about 20% of us use it as of today. Even if it were somehow provable that Chrome is 4,000% better than the status quo, migration would make glaciers look fast.

• Chrome is open source software, and some businesses see "open source" as synonymous with "big hassle," despite the fact that some open source apps and utilities outperform their commercial counterparts in both speed and stability.

In the conservative realm of the office world, it's likely that many companies will pass on this interesting new browser for the time being. And Windows folks are the only ones who have the choice: People on Linux and Mac--many of them early adopters who aren't willing to settle for the status quo and who are probably more open to using alternative browsers in the first place--will have to wait for their versions, which Google promises to deliver "as soon as possible." as the site puts it to Mac visitors.

Imagine the IRS--which sometimes waits to upgrade a majority of its computers to the current version of Reader until that version is no longer current--flipping a switch and going to Google Chrome. Maybe, in 2015. If Google's lucky. This massive government agency is perhaps the single biggest purveyor of PDFs on the planet, and by necessity it must crawl like a turtle through new tech implementation.

Yet, having used many alternative browsers, PDF viewers, and open-source solutions (including dumping Vista on my lapper and installing Ubuntu), my own experience indicates that any document that touches Adobe's browser plug-ins, Acrobat, or Reader seems to slow life down, regardless of what operating system you're using.

To overcome these slowdowns, many have turned to using alternate viewers such as Preview on the Mac, Evince on Linux, and Foxit (which, by the way, Larry Page advocated putting in the Google Pack instead of Adobe Reader, but his team decided to go with Reader anyway after months of debate), or web sites like Google Docs, Issuu, and Scribd, which accelerate the consumption of long PDFs online.

There are times, however, when Adobe software is the best--or only--solution for a PDF. For instance, when collaborating on a PDF or filling in a form that requires Reader. Or when working with a secure document locked with Adobe DRM. Or when printing those infernal files the U.S. Postal Service chucks out for its Click-N-Ship Priority Mail labels, whatever they are. You're stuck, sometimes.

Google Chrome shows promise, appearing to give us access to the Adobe browser plug-in, but with the speed of its nimbler competitors. At this writing, it's only been out a few hours, and we've only had time to crunch a few sample documents, long and short. But so far, so good.

— Saludos, GAby Menta... SAn Acrobat

lunes, 18 de agosto de 2008



Lee y edita archivos PDF con la nueva versión de Skim
Denns


La última actualización de Skim ha corregido errores que causaban inestabilidad en el software y ahora las posibilidades que ofrece esta aplicación gratuita se han incrementado.

A pesar de mantener algunas fallas menores ya se perfila como un excelente editor pues nos brinda una buena variedad de funciones adicionales a los mostrados en sus versiones anteriores como cambiar el tamaño del documento, agregar cuadro de notas, sombreado, etc.

Pero lo más importante es que contarás con una herramienta fiable y sencilla de utilizar pues su interacción con el usuario es más intuitiva.

Saludos, GAby Menta y a disfrutar..... Byeeee


Vía | Coolosxapps

martes, 5 de agosto de 2008

New Web Sites Help Convert RSS to PDF

PDF Version

How-To: Several new Web services let you quickly convert your RSS feeds to PDF for easy archiving, annotation and redistribution of information. Here's how (and why).

At first blush, converting an RSS feed to PDF can seem like a dubious proposition. After all, why would you want to take something as fleeting and transitory as breaking news and permanently hard-code it into a file?

But there are several uses for RSS to PDF conversion that can help users redistribute, archive and take feed information offline:

Redistribution: Share a round-up of the day's news with co-workers. PDF documents can be e-mailed to those who don't use RSS.
Easy Integration: Supplement an existing PDF document with a resource list of links.
Annotation: Share comments about sites and news by annotating the feed URLs with text and audio inside the PDF.

Archiving: Create printable copies of your news feeds.
News Reading: Turn Adobe Reader into an RSS feed reader and avoid downloading a newsreader application.
Offline Reading: Take news with you when you're on the go, either by printing a PDF or copying it to your handheld devices.
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Want to convert PDFs to audio formats? Click here to read more.

If converting from RSS to PDF strikes you as an effective way to manage your information, several new sites offer the capability. Rss2pdf.com, which launched July 29, was first out of the gate.

Several sites with similar capabilities, such as rss2pdf.org, launched soon after.

To convert an RSS feed to a PDF file, visit rss2pdf.com and paste a feed URL in the text box.

You can choose whether to include images in the PDF and specify whether you're converting from RSS or OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language).

OPML is a common file format for exchanging RSS feeds between RSS aggregators.

Converting from an OPML file allows you, in effect, to turn Adobe Reader into a newsreader for all your feeds.

RSS feeds can be more than just text. For example, Flickr's RSS feeds can be used to create custom contact sheets of images in a PDF.

Can't find your PDF buttons in Word and other applications? Click here to read more.

Rss2pdf.com and its competitors aren't the only conversion utilities out there.

Adobe's own Acrobat 7, available since January 2005, offers the very same ability.

To convert feeds to PDF in Acrobat 7, choose View > Tracker. Then, choose Services > Subscribe.

In the dialogue box, enter an RSS feed and press OK. The tracker will then show the news feed in the left-hand column.

The list updates automatically whenever the site you're tracking posts more news.

In addition, on Windows, an icon will appear in your system tray notifying you that the site you are tracking has updated.

To convert the feed to a PDF, right-click on the feed title and select Convert to PDF. The process is similar on a Mac.

Acrobat 7 is a great tool for RSS to PDF conversion. But for users who don't have the scratch to spare for Acrobat, the free Web conversion services are great resources.

Saludos, GAby Menta

PDFZone

miércoles, 23 de julio de 2008

Web 2.0 Apps Come Slowly Under Control of IT

PDF Version

Marketing and sales have led in the development of Web. 2.0 apps, and continue to own them, according to a new report, which predicts IT will be the one holding the bag by the end of this year.

You would think that blogs, wikis and social networks launched by businesses to engage with customers in product and brand development scenarios would be commanded by IT people.

Not so, according to a "2008 Tribalization of Business Survey," conducted by Deloitte Services and released July 16. The survey, which included 140 various companies, found that 42 percent of the respondents granted the CMO (chief marketing officer) reign over these networks.

Thirty-nine percent of the companies that participated cited idea generation as the purpose of their blogs, wikis and social networks, while 19 percent said they leverage these tools to drive new product development. These are largely overseen by marketing managers.

"You actually have marketing now running value creation for things like product development and customer care," which from an organizational perspective is probably not optimal, Deloitte Services Director of Product Innovation Ed Moran told me.

Bye, GAby Menta

pdfzone

jueves, 17 de julio de 2008



Home Mobile Reports of E-Book's Demise Still Premature


PDF Version

Analysis: The market for e-books continues to grow slowly but surely.

Even though not everyone yet owns an Amazon Kindle or the whip-smart, PDF-savvy Sony Reader Digital Book, the e-book medium is alive and well.
Many "trade" e-books from large publishers originate from application files made in QuarkXPress or InDesign, converted via custom specs in Acrobat or other PDF authoring tools.

But with most of the world's published books marooned in paper format -- either created before the advent of desktop publishing or with the original PageMaker, Frame, or QuarkXPress files lost to fire, weather, or the sands of time -- paper-to-PDF that's also printable, searchable, and lightweight enough to be served on the web is still something of a technological holy grail.

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It involves more software trickeration than can be squeezed out of Acrobat, which often offers the "lightweight file, printable, browseable -- choose two" solution for long, scanned, image-heavy documents such as manuals, textbooks, illustrated histories or any of a number of other graphics-heavy volumes.

On that front, a sort-of new player, IoFlex, is getting attention right now thanks to several recent key deals and its bringing out from under wraps its long-in-development, enterprise-class content conversion and archiving tools that enable publishers to migrate content from paper to PDF.

Publishing consultant and frequent PDF conference presenter Michael Jahn says IoFlex -- a company he works with -- has been "flying below the radar" the last few years as the company gathered R&D data on improving its paper-to-PDF processing, especially on the graphics side.

Jahn doesn't think that e-book files, in the end, will grab the public's fancy the way the MP3 files have, courtesy of the iTunes/iPod combination. But electronic books and publications will eventually be the standard, just as the iPod is among MP3 players.

"At some point, it might be more legislative," Jahn says. "[Lawmakers] are going to say, 'Fifty cents for a newspaper? You guys are nuts, that ain't gonna cut it. It costs twice as much to recycle it. Sorry, we're not going to let you print newspapers.' Never mind global warming and carbon footprints. I just don't see sustainability when it comes to ink on paper."

IoFlex provides Acrobat plugins, applications, and servers to enable the creation of print-on-demand (POD) ready books for BiblioBazaar, a startup launched by the founders of the POD monolith BookSurge as their noncompete agreement expires with Amazon, which had purchased BookSurge in 2005. Other IoFlex customers include RRDonnelly, Integrated Book Technology, and LightningSource.

POD and e-books might seem to be completely separate animals, but in the end, they share a lot of the same stripes, at least when a book or document starts in paper form. Both need deskewing (making pages straight where a page scanned slightly off-kilter) and cleanup of noise and other junk that appears in the file as a byproduct of rapid scanning of thin paper. IoFlex's tools take on the task of deskewing and cleaning up pages automatically, recentering content as well as tuning up images for print or screen reading, according to the user's job specs.

Images in POD books, of course, need to be printable, and that's also the case for some e-books. On top of that, e-books produced from scans need optical character recognition (OCR), which, like basic deskewing, can be done in Acrobat and in less expensive off-the-shelf office suites from vendors such as ABBYY and Nuance.

Those products work for companies circulating internal documents electronically and building electronic archives of corporate knowledge. IoFlex, however, is aiming at commercial publishing clients who are building nimble content archives that can be output for print use or searchable on-screen browsing without losing the original scans, and with a minimum of intensive, page-by-page "by hand" cleanup and manipulation.

Saludos, GAby Menta

By Don Fluckinger

lunes, 7 de julio de 2008


Adobe's PDF becomes ISO standard

Adobe Systems' popular portable document format, or PDF as it's more well-known, has become the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard as of Wednesday morning.

Adobe has been the key developer and patent holder of the technology, and on Wednesday passed over the entire specification of version 1.7 to the Geneva-based ISO. This comes just a year and a half after Adobe made plans to open up by giving the specification to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) which was to lay the groundwork for ISO certification.

The ISO has issued a press release about the new standard (named "ISO 32000-1:2008"), along with a quote from Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch about the move expanding the PDF universe. "As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years," Lynch said.

It's nearly verbatim with what he said back in the AIIM hand-off, but holds true to what typically happens when any file format is ISO certified. They'll typically become more attractive to governments and large corporate customers.


As for consumers, the PDF format has been a hit or miss affair on the Web. PDFs are well-known for taking a long time to open in browsers with Adobe's own Reader software. Others like Apple have come in and integrated PDF reading into its Safari browser, while users of Firefox have sought third-party solutions like Foxit to speed up the process. Likewise, PDF search results on Google have had an "open as HTML" option for some time now, letting users forgo formatting for speed.

Other recent file formats that received ISO certification include Microsoft's Office Open XML format, which passed a vote for approval back in April.

Bye bye GAby Menta

jueves, 3 de julio de 2008


ISO approves PDF as an international standard

Move reflects a trend to standardize broadly adopted file formats to increase interoperability between different apps used to create business documents The International Organization for Standardization has approved Adobe Systems' widely used PDF (Portable Document Format) as an international standard, and is now in charge of any changes made to the specification.

Free IT resource Microsite: Smart Ways to Grow Small Business IT Sponsored by AMD Free IT resource If you don't have enough I/O, your VMs aren't going to go.

Sponsored by HP/Intel Related Stories Adobe works on Flash for iPhone, as Apple looks to Sprout Popular Tags pdf,, iso,, adobe, The format is open and accessible to anyone as ISO 32000-1, the standards body said Wednesday. The standard is based Adobe's version 1.7 of PDF.

PDF, the file format for Adobe's Acrobat software, has long been used as a standard way for people to exchange and view business documents. However, Adobe kept a proprietary hold on the format until it finally succumbed to industry pressure and submitted PDF for standardization in February 2007.


Adobe's move reflected an industrywide trend to standardize broadly adopted file formats to increase interoperability between different applications people use to create business documents. Microsoft submitted Office Open XML, a proprietary XML-based document format it built for its Office 2007 productivity suite, to the ISO. The ISO approved OOXML on April 1 in a controversial vote that is still being contested by some of the standards bodies that took part in it. Microsoft had also aimed to include PDF support in Office 2007 but revised that plan at the last minute over a squabble with Adobe. However, PDF support will be added to Office 2007 in a service pack from Microsoft expected to be released early next year. That update also will add support for Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), an XML-based file format that also is an ISO standard. ODF is a rival to OOXML; it became an international standard in May 2006.

Saludos, GAby Menta SAn Acrobat....

lunes, 30 de junio de 2008

OpenXML Debate Intensifies as Critical Vote Looms


PDF Version

ADVERTISEMENTPartisans raise barricades for pitched battles over whether Microsoft's
OpenXML has changed enough for ratification.

The war of words between Microsoft, IBM and others with an interest in document formats has reached a boiling point ahead of the crucial vote later this month on whether or not Microsoft’s Office Open XML format should be approved as an ISO standard.
The format failed to achieve the two-thirds vote needed for approval as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization in September.

That was followed by a ballot resolution meeting in Geneva this February, designed to find consensus on modifications to the document in light of the comments made by the national bodies that voted.

Saludos, GAby Menta

martes, 24 de junio de 2008


Google Joins Microsoft/Adobe Fight Over Developers



PDF Version

With the Google App Engine, Google is adding its own approach to the fight between Microsoft and Adobe over how developers and designers should work together on Web applications. Although Microsoft and Adobe seem to be duking it out over the issue of developer-designer workflow, Google enters the scene with its own focus on how designers and developers can work together using Google App Engine. Microsoft has been touting connections between its Expression suite of design tools and its Visual Studio developer tool, and Adobe offers its Creative Suite and Flex tools, along with its upcoming "Thermo" technology, to help designers and developers work better together. However, at the recent Google I/O developer conference, members of the Google UX team spoke on the need for designers and developers to work better together and said Google App Engine is the place for it. Google App Engine lets developers build and run their Web applications on Google's infrastructure.

Saludos, GAby Menta

pdfzone

jueves, 19 de junio de 2008

Could Unipage Topple PDF?

PDF Version

Opinion: An open-source upstart tries to shake up the global electronic-document debate.

It's March Madness again, which means it's time to root for underdogs and lesser-knowns. So there's no better time to take a look at Unipage, a new and interesting challenge to the PDF standard.

"Uni-what?" you might ask, and rightly so. If you're a PC user, download the latest version and check it out.

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Unipage is a soon-to-be-open-source project led by programmer G. Zaslavsky.

"At the superficial level and initial stage, [Unifier] is merely a convenience utility for saving Web pages," Zaslavsky wrote in an e-mail while traveling to Nepal.

"However, the point isn't only to have a single file, but also to work around all of today's browsers' handicapped ability of saving pages for offline or for editing. They don't save all the linked components."

Zaslavsky said that in its present incarnation, it's sort of like Acrobat's Web Capture tool, or "magic HTML."

So you can think of Unipages as PDF files, and its companion PC app, Unipage Unifier, as Acrobat Ultra Lite. Soon, Unifier will be a plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer. It's so new, it's like pre-release Acrobat from the "Camelot" era. Got it?

But don't look at Unipage as just "in the rough" software. It's already caused spirited debate on Slashdot about what it could become.

Zaslavsky's team plans to move ahead and build Unipage into an open-source challenger to Acrobat and PDF. It won't be challenging in an apples-to-apples way so much as a "VHS versus Betamax" way: Unipages won't print exactly the same in every setting like PDF, because they're based on HTML. They will, however, unlike PDF, render on any Web-enabled device.

But who would use it?

"When trying to save or send online pages you can never rely on sending a link to a page, as pages keep changing and the viewer may see a different page than you originally saw," Zaslavsky said.

"Further, you may want to send a page that can't be accessed freely, such as in a personal account zone of a site or an Intranet. With Unipage, Jane will choose "Send as Unipage" from the menu in her browser and when Sally opens it [in her own default browser] she will see the exact same page."

That makes Unipage an archiving tool, too, along the lines of the way some firms use PDF to archive their Web sites, taking a snapshot of the content and code at a particular moment in time.

Upcoming Unipage releases include Firefox and IE plug-ins that make those browsers a Unipage viewer and creator in one. A Mac OS version of Unifier is in the works, too. It's at this point that the potential installed base rockets past that of Adobe Reader. Don't take lightly a product that can reach further than Acrobat or even Windows, into Blackberrys, Web phones or anything that can parse HTML.

Zaslavsky sees the potential for Unipage to leave Acrobat and PDF in the dust.

But it's a long road from here to where Acrobat is, and open-source software has its pros and cons. Zaslavsky sees a Unipage as potentially extensible as Adobe Acrobat, attracting an eventual ecosystem of third-party developers pitching in to create tools for editing Unipages with word-processor interfaces, and wizards for creating Unipages from a wide range of templates.

The short cut to rapid deployment, if that ever comes, will be free distribution.

What about security?

But the key to PDF's success—and the source of many users' frustration—is that the documents remain locked down and really can't be edited easily, if at all.

Unipage, if it one day made a play for PDF's iron grip on the secure electronic document space of big finance, law and government work—not to mention the architecture and engineering world—might have to come up with ways of giving business security features and the ability to lock down content.

In my position, I see a lot of PDF-making software, and I've seen the rise and fall of competing document formats. I've got this feeling about Unipage. It's quirky, and it's really, really early in development. At the moment it looks like rickety freeware, not world-beating technology.

Yet there's something about it that tells me Unipage eventually, in some more evolved rev, will find some good use out there in e-doc land. Some Unipages will take the place of more than a few PDFs. Enough PDFs for Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen to take notice? If it did, it'd be like Albany knocking off UConn in March Madness on a buzzer-beating three-pointer.

Envisioning the future

Zaslavsky's vision is part of why I think Unipage might chew up more PDF business than, say, Microsoft Reader or Microsoft InfoPath technologies.

"It's clear that with the explosion of non-printed viewing media (and in the near future digital ink?)," Zavlasky said, "we will have to gradually let go of thinking in terms of printed pages."

Are you listening, Bruce Chizen? This guy's on to something. At the very least, Zaslavsky is banging around at bottom rungs of the electronic document ladder, appealing to users who'd buy Acrobat Elements in a heartbeat if individual users could buy single copies (they can't).

Finally. Unipage does something Battleship Acrobat can't: It makes uncomplicated electronic documents cheap, fast and easy. Keep your eye on this. It's just an idea right now, but in five years, with a little luck, Unipage could become a cult … and finally, a force.

Woowwwwww......Good Luck, GAby Menta

miércoles, 18 de junio de 2008



Why Buzzword and Google Docs Are Different Animals

PDF Version

Adobe's charging hard into the online word processor market with Buzzword, and the app's creator hopes that its WYSIWYG interface—and hooks into Adobe Reader—will help it triumph as the formative market declares its allegiances

Adobe rolled out Buzzword, an online word processor, last week as part of its Acrobat.com suite of services accompanying the release of Acrobat 9.
Buzzword has a tight interface, with horizontally expanding and collapsing buttons that keep the browser environment clutter-free while packing in a lot of features. It imports files from many standard office apps, exports to PDF, and offers the collaboration and review features of its competitors. On top of that, Buzzword adds basic web-conferencing via Acrobat.com's ConnectNow.

Its biggest differentiator, however says Rick Treitman, former CEO of Buzzword's creator Virtual Ubiquity, is that it's WYSIWYG: What's on screen is exactly what prints out, without need for the "print previews" of ancient desktop word processors from the 1980s and many current online word processors—Google Docs included—require in order to determine things like where page breaks fall and how (and where) graphics will render.

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WYSIWYG capability was the main priority for the team who built Buzzword, guided by their previous experiences working with Lotus Manuscript and Interleaf, both document tools. To accomplish that, they had to forget about leveraging the web browser's built-in HTML editing tools or building in AJAX, as both have limited awareness of—and compatibility with—printers. They wrote the app from scratch in Flex and designed it to run on Flash.

"The first thing we felt needed to be done was real-time pagination," says Treitman, a software veteran who worked at Lotus before starting Virtual Ubiquity, which Adobe acquired last year, retaining him as an entrepreneur-in-residence. "So we wrote a pagination engine that sets the page with every keystroke exactly the way it's going to print out.... All of us had been in the business a long time; we've all been looking for a great virtual machine. It turns out the Flash Player is that great virtual machine."

The online word processor market is a strange, new place: While Google Docs and competing tools get plenty of coverage in publications like eWeek, only a small fraction of office workers seem to be aware of them—and many fewer claim to use them at all. That's because people have become so used to working in desktop apps such as Microsoft Word that it becomes difficult to change tools, as well as changing workflows to accommodate the new tools, Treitman says.

But desktop machines prove to be mortal document repositories when their hard drives crash, and workers who must access their documents from several locations and computers have found online repositories like the ones Google Docs and Buzzword host to be effective efficiency tools.

So people come to use the new tools, one by one. Treitman's hoping that Buzzword adoption will spread via the usual viral means, but its secret marketing weapon is its association with Acrobat and Reader, which together—like Flash—are on most of the world's computers.

"These applications are consumer adoptions at this point.... I think that individuals are discovering these online applications and are bringing them to the office, and the office is just in the process of waking up to them, seeing what they are, and starting to adopt them," Treitman says.

"I don't want to take credit for this thought—I think Google pointed it out—but [it's] just like the consumer adoption of the Apple II back when I was a young pup. They were carried in by analysts who didn't want to be captive to the glass house [of the mainframe or IBM PCs of the era]. Or instant messaging, which was pretty much discovered by pre-teens but now all office workers have it in their desks."

The big hurdle to online word processor adoption is the "online" part: How do you make them work when the wi-fi gets weak or the user's unplugged from Internet access? Google built that function into Docs with its Google Gears plug-in; Adobe's working on a 2.0 version of Buzzword that will run offline as a rich-Internet AIR app. The rats'-nest issue of seamlessly syncing changes across multiple users working offline—when they eventually log on again—is the logistical issue toughest to solve. But Treitman says they'll get it done.

Bye bye GAby MEnta

lunes, 16 de junio de 2008

Acrobat 9, With Flash, Moves Adobe Farther Ahead of Silverlight


PDF Version

Flash in PDF files, up to this point, has been a developers' diversion. Just as MySpace, WordPress, and Flickr enable the average person to quickly create sophisticated web content, the new Acrobat aims to be Everyman's basic Flash integration tool

While Microsoft is attempting to whip up excitement over Silverlight—a Flash alternative—the technology remains little seen but oft-discussed, a theoretical science.
With Acrobat 9, Adobe delivers Flash to the masses.

To the outside world, it's kind of hard to look at a new release of Acrobat as exciting new technology. The ninth version of an electronic documents authoring tool. Yee-ha.

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Inside Adobe, however, people are pretty jacked up. In fact, while it's her job to say she's more excited over this Acrobat 9 than any previous version, Group Product Marketing Manager Marion Melani might have good reason to be so excited this time around.

The new version ostensibly makes it easier to incorporate Flash into a PDF than ever before — the way WordPress and Blogger.com made blogging accessible to the HTML-ignorant world, and MySpace and Facebook brought cookie-cutter Web design to even the rankest amateurs.

"Acrobat 9 is a really exciting release [because] it has native support for Flash in Acrobat and Adobe Reader," Melani says. "The possibilities of being able to incorporate Flash and have portable playback no matter what platform you're on through Adobe Reader, we believe, is absolutely huge. It really opens up what a PDF can be and what you can do with electronic documents."

"Flash support," for the uninitiated, doesn't just mean video a la YouTube, although Acrobat 9 can create Flash video from other formats via a simple drag-and-drop operation. Acrobat group product manager Michael Folkers says that the most basic application of Flash are the template-driven "PDF Portfolios," which basically organize data in an easy-to-digest manner.

"The bar for creating these PDF Portfolios—we also describe them as 'document experiences'—is quite low," Folkers says. "We used the quote-unquote average knowledge worker as our design guideline for ease-of-use. It's super easy to create a really compelling document experience in Acrobat."

For more adventurous users, Acrobat 9 includes features for rolling your own rudimentary rich Internet apps that poll the web for updated content and otherwise interact with readers. Putting into practice what could theoretically be done before but not by most of the MySpace generation.

On one hand, people look to PDF because of its print fidelity—you see on the page what you see on the screen. On the other, adding Flash could take Acrobat to some business-useful sweet spot somewhere between paper pages (which are static) and web pages (which are interactive, but are also sometimes incomprehensible when printed).

Adobe's built it, but as the famous line in Field of Dreams goes, will they come? Or, more to the point, will they buy it? For the full-boat Flash video integration, buyers will need to go for Acrobat Extended Pro (Windows only), which will have a suggested retail price of $699, while the Professional version (Mac and Windows) has a partial set of Flash-y capabilities, but a $449 price tag. Standard (Windows only), sans the Flash goodies, is $299. Adobe sorts out the features present in the various Acrobat flavors here.

Besides Flash, there are many other improvements to Acrobat 9, from redaction to new support for ISO document standards like PDF/E, PDF/X, and PDF/A's various iterations, and simpler tools to facilitate collaboration online among Reader-using colleagues. Prepress users get more control over their black colors (a longstanding want) and an upgraded "intelligent overprint preview," an esoteric feature that—if it works well—will likely lower the blood pressure of more than a few deadline-crazed workstation dwellers at print facilities.

But by now, that print stuff's old-skool. While Adobe continues to respect that market—the foundation upon which the company built its Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign empire—it's betting that Flash and Acrobat will do for electronic documents what YouTube, Flickr, and page-layout templates did for social-networking sites and the blogosphere. If Acrobat could scale higher peaks of mass appeal in the enterprise world, Adobe's Flash gambit would more than pay off for the company, especially if it makes the world forget about Silverlight in the process.

Saludos, GAby Menta

pdfzone

jueves, 12 de junio de 2008

What Adobe is Thinking with Acrobat Site

PDF Version

Will Buzzword cut into Create PDF online? Will free PDF authoring in Buzzword cut into desktop Acrobat user base? Adobe exec answers these—and other—questions that came up in the wake of this week's Acrobat.com online services rollout.

In going online with a relaunched Acrobat.com site this week, Adobe's skating a fine line between enhancing the desktop experience and cannibalizing the lucrative seats—now up to a suggested retail of $699 a pop for Acrobat Extended Pro—with a suite of free services that pieces off some of Acrobat's PDF authoring and web conferencing features.


For now, Create PDF Online offers the same free authoring of a limited number of PDFs as it has for the last several years. New is the Buzzword word processor, which also can create free PDFs but is more limited in what it can import. That makes it a separate animal from Create PDF Online, says Mark Grilli, Acrobat.com group product marketing manager.

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ConnectNow gives Acrobat.com users a taste of Acrobat's web-conferencing tools, and Share represents a document sharing service where others can interact in document editing.

Behind the scenes at Adobe, there had to have been some spirited discussion about whether enabling free PDF export in the free Buzzword online word processor or being able to launch a version of Connect outside the Acrobat box would woo potential paying customers away. Or would it work as a marketing tool to draw in more potential users?

"We think it will be an enhancement to the Acrobat brand, in that it will bring more users into the fold," says Grilli, who adds he feels that the collaboration tools and online document repositories at Acrobat.com will show non-Acrobat users just how much the application itself can do with PDFs.

Google Docs changed the PDF authoring game when it made PDF export as a feature of its free word processor. Grilli—like his peers at Corel, who earlier this year said that Google Docs' mindshare among office workers is relatively low—thinks that Adobe isn't necessarily competing head-to-head with Google Docs; there's plenty of market space to share at this point.

"Our understanding—in doing market research and talking to knowledge workers—it's not so much a switching problem, we're not trying to convince people to switch from Google Docs," Grilli says. "It's getting new people in the fold."

People, he continues, who are now circulating "15 versions of the same document" via email, collecting comments and annotations, and reconciling them in a final version. Acrobat.com strives to make an online home for documents—PDF and otherwise—where everyone is literally on the same page and users don't waste time syncing up different versions of their work.

"We had a woman we were interviewing who spent 80% of her time [reconciling revisions from emailed documents]," Grilli says. "When you're working on one version of the document in the cloud, it removes the need to do all of that—it really is a new way to think about doing things."

One cue Adobe's taking from Google is the public beta aspect of the rollout of online tools. Unlike Google—which seems to be in a permanent state of public beta—Grilli says Adobe has an endgame. After that point, the company will likely charge for some of the services that are currently free during the test phase. Adobe promises, however, that there will always be a free version of Buzzword available at Acrobat.com.

Another interesting facet of Acrobat.com is the AIR version, a runtime desktop app that functions outside the browser. In the current iteration, Buzzword does not function offline, but that's a possibility for future revs.

On first blush, the AIR runtime edition seems like a distant third cousin to Acrobat, a far outpost from the mothership. Upon closer examination, however, its upside is fascinating: Not only is Adobe eating its own cooking by manufacturing an interesting use case for its authoring tools—but if Buzzword runs offline and syncs up when the user jumps back on the Internet, it will be a huge competitive advantage that would entice users of other online word processors like Google Docs and their ilk to dump them and make Acrobat.com their main axe.

"The benefit to the average user, today, is that you can drag and drop things from your desktop—it's an efficiency tool, an access point that's similar to the browser experience," says Grilli who adds that an offline-enabled Buzzword is in the works. "Down the road, we're going to have much more to offer—offline capabilities, and functions that are currently not available."

Saludos, GAby Menta

miércoles, 11 de junio de 2008

Adobe flaunts Macromedia tech in new Acrobat

PDF Version

For better or for worse, the PDF authoring tool gets a Flash-y shot in the arm.

While Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 — and Acrobat 8 didn't come out until late 2006 — it turns out that Adobe was deep enough into the Acrobat development cycle at the time of the Macromedia purchase that there just wasn't enough time for close integration of the newly acquired technology Acrobat 8.
In Acrobat 9, the Acrobat engineering team made up for lost time:

A new Acrobat Connect (formerly Breeze) attempts to enrich document collaboration online with chat and less-primitive markups.
Enhanced video-to-Flash conversion capabilities help PDF authors integrate more interactive content into their documents, further widening the gulf between paper and PDF (imagine a corporate prospectus, marketing presentation, or annual report with video reportage and in-person executive Q&As embedded within).
A truly beautiful PDF Portfolios feature -- reminiscent of iPod/iTunes' "cover flow" -- offers a Flash-driven visual representation of documents embedded within a PDF.
What Adobe wants to do is to make PDF authoring and use a more engaging process, our sources say. That's a tough thing to accomplish, because it was pretty innovative technology to begin with and has engaged the whole world (think about how many PDFs arrived in your email inbox just this week).

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On the other hand, PDF is still a document format; just a document format. It's not cool like Wii, or sexy like iTunes. It's Acrobat and PDF, as useful as a folding cardboard box but boring as one, too.

But there's hope. Think about iTunes and the iPod: They took an unsexy file format, MP3, and made it (and the hard drive it rode in on) the coolest thing since the 8-track took rock-n-roll out of the living room turntable and into the car.

Way back in the early 1980s, John Warnock saw the Macintosh and envisioned the machine as a vehicle for computerized print shops and launched Adobe on that idea. Could it be that the iPod metaphor could be ported over to finally energize and organize the average office cube dweller's messy pile of electronic documents?

Maybe. Whatever happens, the new PDF Portfolio feature is a great example of ex-Macromedia integration. Named "PDF Package" before, it was an interesting feature for people with good imaginations. Now, in a Flash-based, iTunes-like way, Acrobat takes you by the hand and shows how the feature — basically a way to build document libraries connected to a project or topic, from which the original files can be extracted and updated later — works.

The way our sources see it, PDF Portfolios are a quick-yet-slick way to organize multi-document email attachments so that they make more sense to the recipient and take up less bandwidth than the originals. They're also an intuitive way to archive materials and get around the fact, later, that PDFs are uneditable and the original source material from which a PDF was made either can't be located or flat-out doesn't exist. And you don't even have to be particularly creative or a Flash geek to get functionality out of the feature; Acrobat sports templates from which portfolios can be built.

Only time will tell if bolting on ex-Macromedia widgets can make PDF more valuable, more engaging, and more useful. In the end, as a PDF white wizard once told me, everything that's needed in PDF is already there; the trick for Adobe is to get people using more of it.

It's analogous to the human brain: We're all capable of thinking on an Einstein scale, some of us way beyond that. How do we tap into that potential? That's Adobe's job with PDF, getting us to use more of what's already there.

Acrobat 9 attempts to do that. It remains to be seen whether this new version provides 32 million units' worth of unlocked potential, the sales figures we're told Adobe projects for the new version to be announced Monday.

Saludos, GAby Menta

pdfzone

lunes, 9 de junio de 2008



Prepress Developer Announces XPS-PDF Bridge


PDF Version

PDF prepress software developer makes splash at Dusseldorf quadrennial printing show—and throws open Certified PDF to outside development

On the eve of Adobe Acrobat 9's introduction, PDF print production vendor Enfocus announced enhansepends that could bridge the format divide created by competition between Adobe and Microsoft.

The announcement, made during the once-every-four-years international printing trade show DRUPA in Dusseldorf, Germany.

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New versions of the company's Switch print- and file-management software can take files in XPS—Microsoft's much-hyped, PDF-like file format—and convert to PDF via Actino Software XPS Toolkit, signaling an early market acknowledgment of XPS's legitimacy in the print world.

"While XPS is not present to a high degree in publishing workflows today, it can be expected that more and more XPS documents will find their way to publishers and printers," says David van Driessche, Enfocus marketing director. "Having a strategy to deal with those documents will become very important. Publishers and printers now have a high-quality conversion path from XPS to PDF--a file format they know how to deal with."

Enfocus founder Peter Camps announced that the company's throwing open to developers, royalty-free, its Certified PDF specification. A method for creating PDFs that are up-to-snuff for print production, Certified PDF can also tracks changes made to PDFs in the print workflow stream.

"We're proud to be able to make this important announcement to open up the Certified PDF technology to other vendors," Camps says. "This will enable more vendors to support Certified PDF, leading to a wider choice of applications with embedded Certified PDF technology. This initiative is in line with our company mission to offer end-to-end automation solutions to the graphic arts and publishing sectors in collaboration with other vendors."

The company also announced a series of other upgrades:

Pitstop Pro 08: New features include sign-off on preflight errors; a redesigned PitStop Inspector; better page configuration handling; expanded contextual menus to help navigate through its many and complicated features; and updated OS compatibility. Also included is PDF/X-4 support and simpler PDF Profile adaptation for creating new preflight profiles from existing items.

PitStop Server 08: Enfocus says that the new version of its hot-folder network implementation of PitStop features a significant performance bump as well as a reworked interface to make using it easier. It can now run as a service on Windows and as a login item on Mac OS X. Key to its performance upgrade is a new parallel-processing scheme in which two PDFs can be handled at a time.

Switch 08: New versions of LightSwitch, FullSwitch and PowerSwitch enable more precise automation of print workflows and offer more options for prioritization of files as they work their way through to press. Based on user feedback, Enfocus built in finer control of scheduling of content processed via hot folders, FTP and email receive tools. Switch 08 also offers a "read-only" processing mode where the original files are left on the server and a copy is processed through the flow.

Saludos, GAby Menta

pdfzone

miércoles, 28 de mayo de 2008

Acrobat 9 for Mac soon

Adobe is prepping a launch for its Acrobat 9 PDF creation tool within the next two months, AppleInsider has learned.

The new version will primarily extend some features of today's high-end versions to the mainstream. An ability to convert 3D files from AutoCAD and other programs to PDF files will be available in the Professional edition, for example. The software will also enable collaborating on documents from an Adobe server, similar to a web-based beta service launched on Monday.

However, a planned move to allow the creation of fillable PDF forms in the Standard edition will be limited to the Windows release; for Mac users, the option will be available only for the Professional edition, which should cost $200 more. Adobe will offer a free upgrade to anyone who buys a paid version of Acrobat 8 after version 9 is announced.

Adobe is expected to hold a briefing for the press later this month on its plans for the software, though those details will remain secret until late June.

Saludos, GAby Menta

Appleinsider

martes, 27 de mayo de 2008

Acrobat 9 to Include Expanded Forms Support


PDF Version

New features in the upcoming release enable forms data tracking via Acrobat.com,, video commenting.

Sources familiar with the upcoming Acrobat 9—likely to be released early this summer—say one new wrinkle involves a forms data-tracking service via an updated Acrobat.com Web site to be unveiled along with the release of the application upgrade.

The service resolves, Adobe-style, the age-old question of, "Once you make a PDF form in Acrobat, what do you do next?" Users who create effective e-forms for the first time quickly become overwhelmed when they realize that they have to do something with the data coming in to them via forms.

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If that holds through to release, some third-party solutions on the market now will still be able to compete on the basis of being more inclusive: They can take input data collected via PDF, HTML, Microsoft InfoPath, and other types of forms.

However, the Adobe-branded, PDF-only solution will likely be popular among organizations that only use PDF forms. Current indications are that the service will make available some of the technology found in Adobe's enterprise-class LiveCycle products to the individual Acrobat user. Meanwhile, regardless of whether they subscribe to the Acrobat.com service, in Acrobat a form owner will be able to track which recipients received their form as well as who filled it out and returned it, according to the sources.

Also expanded in Acrobat 9 will be document redaction, a feature available in Acrobat 8. This will appeal to government and legal customers who haven't already invested in third-party solutions that handle this touchy subject of privacy issues in public documents uploaded to the Web.

Another rumored feature is "PDF Portfolios," a new spin on a current feature called "PDF packages." Currently, users can leverage PDF as a wrapper to embed—or attach—non-PDF application files such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents, so that supporting materials can be assembled in one place, even if they are in different formats. An advantage to this feature is the ability to use Acrobat password protection as an additional security layer for sensitive data.

Acrobat 9's Portfolio feature has a new, more organized, color-coded interface to make complicated document sets more visually appealing and easier to navigate.

Also included, the sources say, is an upgraded OCR (optical character recognition) engine to reduce errors in paper-to-PDF processes. Along the same lines, the Web Capture feature—which converts HMTL pages into PDF—is getting an upgrade. This feature is already one of the major value-adds Acrobat offers users over competing PDF-making apps. An upgraded search feature gives users better results searching across multiple PDFs.

Lastly, an improved "compare PDF documents" feature includes a new wizard to walk you through the process. Sources add that comparison results reports have been updated slightly over Acrobat 8's functionality. New to Acrobat 9 will be the ability to add comments to video, at the frame-by-frame level, sources say, as well as enhanced capabilities for incorporating Flash (.swf) files in PDFs.

Saludos, GAby Menta

pdfzone

domingo, 25 de mayo de 2008


Convert PDF Documents to SWF Flash Movies Online with PDFMeNot


Like Scibd and SlideShare, PDFMeNot is an online PDF to Flash converter that will instantly convert any Adobe PDF document into a Macromedia Flash (SWF) movie while preserving the original layout, image graphics and formatting.

The PDF to SWF converter can very useful when you have to embed PDF files in web pages for inline viewing or you want to read PDF files on a computer that has no Acrobat Reader.


Here’s how to create Flash movies from PDF documents:

1. Go to PDFMeNot.com (Username: stateless Password: systems) and type the URL of the PDF file - you can use this PDF link as an example. Alternatively upload a PDF from the local hard drive.

2. In your Firefox menu bar, click Tools -> Page Info -> Media. Select the object that has an SWF extension (e.g. pdfmenot.com/store/f6a29535da98cd1.swf) and save it to your disk. That’s the SWF file created from your PDF document. For IE, here’s the trick to save Flash locally.

Bloggers can embed the following JS code in their web templates and PDF links will open in Flash SWF format via PDFMeNot.


While PDFMeNot is an extremely convenient option for quickly viewing PDF files in the browser without loading Adobe Reader, the downside is that the generated SWF objects contains Zoom but no Print and Search function. They are all supported in Macromedia Flash Paper format used by Scribd. Thanks Marshall.

Related: Convert PDF into 3D Flipbook Magazines, Embed PDF Files in Web Pages

Saludos, GAby Menta

Labnol

viernes, 23 de mayo de 2008

Microsoft to support ODF, PDF in Office


Microsoft is finally adding support for Open Document Format for XML and Adobe PDF to its Office productivity suite, the company is expected to announce late Wednesday.

Support for ODF and PDF will be included in the software through Microsoft Office Service Pack 2, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, according to a confidential Microsoft press release viewed by the IDG News Service.

Specifically, the service pack will add file-format support for PDF 1.5, PDF/A and ODF v1.1, as well as XML Paper Specification (XPS). XPS is a similar format to PDF created by Microsoft to rival Adobe's popular document-exchange file format.

Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.

Microsoft created its own XML-based file format, (OOXML) Office Open XML for Office 2007, the latest version of its enormously popular productivity suite that was released in late 2007. This set into motion a heated rivalry between OOXML and ODF, an open standard supported by companies such as IBM and Sun and approved as an ISO standard in May 2006.

Microsoft submitted OOXML to the international standards body Ecma International in November 2005 as an attempt to fast-track it through the ISO. Despite protests and criticisms, that process eventually proved successful on April 1 when the ISO approved OOXML as a standard.

Until now, Microsoft has never said it would natively support ODF, promoting support through software that translates documents between Office file formats and ODF rather than native support. However, the company has been hammered by the industry -- particularly through repeated fines by the European Commission -- for its lack of support for interoperability with other companies' products, and Microsoft has made several recent moves to remedy that situation.

Microsoft previously had said it would support PDF in Office 2007, but Adobe, the owner of the specification, blocked that move. As a result, Microsoft said it would pull native PDF support from Office 2007 in June 2006. Adobe has since submitted PDF to the ISO as an open standard. At the same time it pulled PDF support from Office, Microsoft also pulled planned support for XPS.


Saludos, GAby Menta

Networkworld.

martes, 20 de mayo de 2008




Look Out, Acrobat: Microsoft XPS Is on Your Tail


PDF Version

Opinion: Upon further review, the Windows page-rendering technology, formerly known as "Metro," could pose major headaches for Adobe.

Microsoft's upcoming Vista OS and Office 2007 upgrades pose a paradox for PDF people. On the one hand, the company seems to be conceding that PDF is an essential part of the office worker's life. So it built an export-to-PDF feature into Office. That seems to predict PDF proliferation on a scale we've never seen.
On the other hand, there will be "save as XPS" features in Windows applications, too, which will create PDF-like files. Microsoft's new XPS print subsystem (formerly dubbed "Metro"), part of the underpinnings of Vista, certainly stands to cut into PDF usage.

When news of Metro first came out last year, it sounded as if Microsoft was just performing a necessary upgrade. Metro looked like the pit stop a Word file took en route to the printer—stuff happening so far under the Windows hood that the average PC user wouldn't even notice Metro's machinations.

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I'd heard that Microsoft and Global Graphics—the English PDF and PostScript innovators whose long-lived Harlequin RIP and Jaws PDF software continue to earn solid reps as stable, smart products—demonstrated Metro together at WinHEC in April 2005. So what, I thought at the time, Microsoft's in league with people who know their way around the print-rendering world. Interesting, but let's not sound the death knell for PDF just yet.

It turns out, however, some features in XPS will make its files more PDF-like and less under-the-hood than previously revealed. According to Global Graphics presenters at the AGI Acrobat and PDF Conference in Orlando, Fla., in May, XPS shares some capabilities with PDF: It can support editable metadata, annotations, digital signatures, hyperlinks, bookmarks and text selection, all bread-and-butter features the average person needs in a PDF. Microsoft or its partners will make available free XPS viewers for Windows, Macintosh, Unix, Linux and anywhere else the documents will reach.

XPS, by the way, isn't a Global Graphics product, or even close. It's all Microsoft. The company consulted with Microsoft on developing the file spec, helped develop a prototype RIP, and provided a "print reference implementation RIP for hardware and software vendors to evaluate and measure print performance when developing their applications," according to Global Graphics marketing communications manager Justin Coombes.

PDF is still a much more robust format. Its security features look as if they'll be stronger than XPS rights-management features (remember, with a new Acrobat and Vista coming out later this year, we're still talking rumors and hypotheticals—but the closer it gets to release date, the surer we're getting). Like PDF, XPS will also be an open, published standard, which likely will inspire third-party software development.

PDF supports multimedia and of course, can be made into complex forms—a function that, rumor has it, will kick into overdrive with Flash support in the next Acrobat rev. XPS won't do any of that; in fact, it cannot support any executable code.

So how will the market shake out, once XPS is on everyone's computer? For Adobe, the best-case scenario would be if Microsoft doesn't figure out how to market XPS as well as it did PDF. Today, people working in vertical markets like law, finance, insurance and government can't live without PDF. They didn't arrive at this conclusion in a vacuum.

The second-best outcome would be along the lines of, despite a Herculean effort on the part of Microsoft, the market itself declaring PDF the alpha dog.

This probably will happen—there's no turning back now that many governments have legislated PDF as their electronic document standard: Even if XPS is a better fit, it's me-too, too late. Archivists have their PDF/A standard, prepress their several PDF/X standards, and engineers PDF/E. All are either ISO-approved or headed that way. XPS will have to prove its mettle for years before inspiring such industry support.

Acrobat 8 is suspiciously absent at the AGI Acrobat & PDF Conference. Click here to read more.

It would seem that the best for which Microsoft can hope—even with its wizened marketing army and engineers who likely know the PC user more intimately than anyone else—would be to snap up the low ground. As in, make Acrobat out to be a Cadillac app and PDF a feature-loaded, bandwidth-draining overkill, and persuade the average office user to use XPS instead of PDF when sending a contract cooked up in Word or e-mail attachment for comment and review. Who needs a Cadillac when our Honda Civic, the one that comes free with the operating system, does the job as well?

Redmond's philosophy might be to let the people who are pushing PDF to its limits, such as creative publishing pros, engineers and draftsmen, and multimedia mavens, keep on doing what they're doing in PDF.

That strategy, over time, could marginalize PDF and Acrobat, painting it as an expensive solution only "for the people who need it," whereas right now it's something everybody needs.

At the Orlando conference, Adobe Acrobat Group Product Manager Rick Brown mentioned that there are more than 600 million Reader seats in the world, a change from the previous year's talk of "over a billion downloads." The new number seems more real, more useful—it's good to know how many of those billion Readers kicking around since Acrobat 1.0 actually are in use today.

The number also helps illustrate how Microsoft might be able to go from having XPS, this nonexistent-as-of-yet, non-competitor to PDF to mano a mano combat overnight: Through good marketing, falling into some sheer dumb luck (like the IRS deciding to standardize on PDF for digital forms), and much investment in a free Reader that works on every machine in the world (even cell phones running Symbian) it took Adobe more than a decade to get its 600 million Readers in action.

XPS doesn't need luck. Microsoft estimates it will be on 400 million machines 18 to 24 months after Vista hits the streets, come hell or high water. Then, the battle's joined.

Saludos, GAby Menta


PDFZone

domingo, 18 de mayo de 2008



Microsoft to Adobe: Deal or No Deal?


PDF Version

Adobe wants MS to remove PDF functionality from Office 2007 and wants changes in MS's new document display and printing technology. But Redmond has made a counter offer. Is antitrust action looming?

Following a published report claiming that Adobe Systems is poised to launch an antitrust suit against Microsoft over Microsoft's Office 2007 planned PDF support, Microsoft is going on the offensive and discussing what has led to the impasse between the two companies.
Adobe has been in discussions with Microsoft for the past four months over alleged tying and predatory pricing concerns that Adobe has regarding Microsoft XML Paper Specification (XPS) and "Save to PDF" technologies that Microsoft was planning to integrate into Windows Vista and Office 2007, said David Heiner, vice president and deputy general counsel in Microsoft's legal department.

When asked whether Microsoft is expecting Adobe to launch an antitrust suit against the company or simply go to U.S. or European Union regulators with their concerns, Heiner said "they (Adobe) are threatening legal action," but would offer no further specifics.

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Adobe is looking to make a case that Microsoft is violating tying and predatory-pricing regulations with XPS and Save to PDF, Heiner said.

Adobe is claiming that PDF export technology constitutes a separate product and that Microsoft is tying both Save to PDF and Save to XPS to Vista and Office 2007 and is making them available for free, thus undercutting Adobe's ability to charge for these kinds of plug-ins.

"I couldn't say, legally, how this would play out," said Directions on Microsoft analyst Robert Helm. "In the U.S., Adobe would need to show that Microsoft is leveraging a monopoly in one market to monopolize a second market. They will have to convince a judge that the second market exists, and that it might be possible to monopolize it. The U.S. Department of Justice was never able to pull that off. The European Commission is a different matter altogether."

Adobe first raised its concerns about XPS and Save to PDF via a letter sent by Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in February, according to sources close to Microsoft.

As a result of its ensuing discussions, Microsoft has agreed to remove from Office 2007 the Save as PDF functionality it had been touting since last fall. While Save as PDF is part of Office 2007 Beta 2, which Microsoft began distributing to thousands of testers the week of May 22, at the behest of Adobe, it will not be part of future releases, Heiner confirmed. Instead, Microsoft will make that feature a separate, free, downloadable plug in.

Microsoft is not cutting out of Vista XPS – the technology code-named "Metro" that many consider to be an alternative to PDF and Postscript, -- Heiner said. Nor is Microsoft removing the "Save as XPS" capability from Office 2007, he said.

Microsoft has offered Adobe the opportunity to have its Acrobat PDF reader bundled into Vista, Heiner said. Microsoft also has extended to Adobe an offer to include in Windows Vista their own "Save as PDF" plug-in. Adobe is still considering the PDF reader integration, but is not interested in the Save as PDF deal, Heiner said.

"We wanted to address every concern they have. We want them to be a happy ISV (independent software vendor)," Heiner said.

Adobe officials declined to offer as many details on the company's negotiations with Microsoft.

"Microsoft is an extremely important partner -- we are one of the largest commercial developers of Windows software outside of Microsoft and we share millions of customers around the world," said an Adobe corporate spokeswoman. "That said, as our CEO Bruce Chizen has stated publicly numerous times in the past, Microsoft has a monopoly and we are always concerned about the possibility that they might abuse that monopoly.

"We've discussed our concerns openly both with Microsoft as well as with a number of regulatory agencies around the world. We decline to comment on the substance of any of our discussions with Microsoft," the spokeswoman added.

Saludos, GAby Menta

pdfzone

domingo, 11 de mayo de 2008




Google Adds PDF Presentations to Google Docs


PDF Version

Google has added a "Save as PDF" feature to the presentation tool in its web-based office automation and collaboration suite.

Now, users of Google's web-based presentation creation tool can take the presentation with them off-line, saving it locally as a PDF. Google Docs now offers a "Save as PDF" feature for presentations directly from its "File" menu.

The online office automation suite already allows for the importing of Microsoft Powerpoint files, among other formats. The new feature makes it possible for users to easily extract shared presentations for off-line viewing as PDFs.

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As the Google Docs Help site documents, the process is fairly straightforward:

"To export a presentation to your local computer as a PDF, follow these steps:
Click the File menu of the presentation you'd like to export.
Select Save as PDF.

In the window that appears, select the option to save the file.
Once your presentation has been exported, you can present your slides while offline by opening the PDF."

Great, great......Bye bye GAby Menta