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