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Jun
26
2008
8:57 AM
by Gee Ranasinha, President, Kexino
As you might have seen, Adobe are now shipping Acrobat 9, after announcing it at DRUPA a few weeks ago. Apart from the fact that the "Standard" and "Pro Extended" versions are available for Windows only, some noteworthy features are:
- The ability to embed video (FLV or H.264) into PDF, including mark-up features
- Content management via PDF Portfolio feature
- 256 bit encryption
- Content-only softproofing, including online collaboration on acrobat.com
- Ability to check PDF standards compliance
Acrobat 9 ProI was invited to a pre-release conference call and demo a couple of weeks before the announcement, and I must say that the demonstrations of the new "PDF Portfolio" features, integrating websites, Flash and QuickTime content, etc. were impressive. Impressive, that is, if the PDF file is the final destination for the file's content.
But what about PDFs destined for the print industry?
PDF, as we all know, stands for "Portable Document Format". By including the ability to embed movies and Flash animations, hasn't PDF suddenly become a lot less portable? OK, virtually any Mac and PC out there today can handle Flash, but what about other OS's, such as Linux, where (going on past performance) Adobe's Flash support has been pretty flaky? Furthermore, what happens with all those handhelds - Blackberry's, SideKicks, Treo's and the like - that have no problem rendering static PDF files but start to choke when rendering video? The Apple iPhone doesn't have Flash support at all - even with its soon-to-be-released v2.0 software upgrade.
Then there's the real doozy: What happens when you throw this PDF, now full of bloated non-printable content, into a RIP? Just when you thought that you were OK to render live text, or transparent objects, or PDF layers, now you've got FLVs, SWFs, MOVs and goodness-knows-what-else shoved in there. If a client sends you a PDF with, for example, an embedded Flash object (even if it's a static object) and the element doesn't appear in print, then who's to blame?
I have often heard it said that Adobe aren't really interested in the print industry and are commercially focussed on "the pink hair brigade" - the much larger market of designers, illustrators, photographers and web designers. Regardless of whether this is true, Adobe's re-positioning of PDF as the "one size fits all" container for multimedia content must surely stick in the throats of PDF stalwarts throughout the print, publishing and packaging industries.
- GeeMan's blog
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This was pretty interesting. I got my regular email from Cnet's download.com and the comment that stood out for me about the 9.0 Reader release was the editor's comment that went something like, if you thought it was trouble dealing with PDFs already, just wait till they contain Flash files!
It's a common misconception that PDFs were designed for the print industry. Truth be told, Adobe's intent with PDF was that it could be used to send an electronic document to any user that could run Adobe Reader, and they could view the document exactly as it was created by the original publisher. That's it.
PDFs are a horrible file format for the print industry. PDFs add layers and layers of abstraction from the orginal design document to be able to accomodate current print and graphics technologies. PDFs were never meant to be edited, were designed with limited graphics support, and had no idea what Illustrator and Photoshop layers and transparency are.
The print industry is long overdue for an open file standard that is designed specifcally for their industry. Ideally this file format would be XML based so that they could be incorporated into any MIS system and edited by any design application written to the standard. The current SVG file standard (itself an extension of XML) would be a good start, however it would need specific extensions to accomodate current graphics and print technologies. The good thing is, SVG is open and so extendable, so anyone could do this right now. Imagine a design once file format that could be repurposed by way of an XSLT template to any media or device format that the advertiser or publisher needs, whether that be print, web, video, cell phone, and more, automatically.
-Tim Boyden