The popular Acrobat alternative gets a tuneup to
desktop suite of PDF creation, editing apps, with enterprise and server
software updates to come
Jaws PDF applications have been around, seemingly, for as
long as Acrobat itself. Yet because Global
Graphics packaged Jaws PDF Creator and Editor into one box and started over
with the version numbering last time around, the well-established Acrobat
alternative last week moved into only Version 2 of what it's now known as The
Jaws PDF Desktop Suite.
The new edition ($89 single user) features a Windows Vista tune-up,
with improvements to the interface and 32-bit performance. There are also a
fistful of minor feature improvements such as math functions in form fields,
new commenting tools, and new integration with Microsoft Office 2007
apps—including the "ribbon" interface on Vista.
While Vista might be getting some bad press — and upgrades
aren't necessarily universal — there's enough people converting to it to make
upgrading the apps that run on the latest Microsoft operating system worthwhile
to make developers, Global Graphics included.
"Something like 90 million users have moved across to
Vista over the last year, I think," says Global Graphics’ sales director
for eDocument Technologies James Bidewell. "We're hearing that from our
customers, and we're responding to it."
Bidewell adds that longtime users will appreciate
"under the hood" performance improvements the developer built into
the new version of Jaws that make it faster and more intuitive.
Ironically, while Microsoft consulted with Global
Graphics—well known as a page-description language specialist and caretaker of
the Harlequin RIP—during developmental phases of XPS, Microsoft's competitor to
PDF, there is no XPS support in Jaws. None yet, anyway, Bidewell says, adding
that the company is keeping tabs on its customer pulse and will support
emerging document formats such as XPS and PDF/A when they start asking for it.
Global has an XPS printer RIP as
well as its eDocument Library
file conversion toolbox that can handle PDF, PostScript, PCL, and XPS—and it's
also got support built in for PDF/A, so it's got the features "on
deck" as it were.
"It wouldn't be having to start from scratch,"
Bidewell says. "We have that and we could turn around in a reasonable
amount of time to respond to what our customers want...At the moment, a lot of
[Jaws] users are using PDF. They've grown up with PDF, they've used it for many
years."
The Jaws PDF Desktop Suite runs on: Windows XP, XP x64 and
Vista; Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2003 Server x64; Windows Terminal
Services on Windows 2003 Server; Citrix Presentation Server 4.0/4.5 on Windows
2003 Server; (Creator only) Microsoft Office XP,2003 and 2007; (Creator only)
MacOS X (up to 10.4 PowerPC only). Bidewell says that Server Suite and 300-plus
user Enterprise Suite will soon see 2.0 upgrades, too.
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