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

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

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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

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.

ADVERTISEMENT
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

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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

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.

ADVERTISEMENT
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

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).

ADVERTISEMENT
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

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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