Experts weigh in on the potential of marrying Flash and PDF if the planned merger of Adobe and Macromedia goes through.ORLANDO, Fla.—The show-floor talk—from the podium and among attendees and vendors—at the AGI Adobe Acrobat & PDF 2005 Conference revolved around one topic: Adobe Systems Inc.'s proposed buyout of Macromedia Inc., announced a few days before.
The most frequently speculated-upon aspect of the deal, by far, was which applications would be killed, and how soon. Beyond that, however, was a long-ranging look at the nuts and bolts of how PDF can be improved with Macromedia technology.
"I love it, I love it to death," said Bob Connolly, president of BC Pictures, a multimedia maven and speaker at the show whose presentation on PDFs containing music MP3s created quite a buzz itself.
His rejoicing was based on his speculation that future versions of Adobe Reader might come embedded with a Flash player from Macromedia, making Flash content display more smoothly.
Show organizer Chris Smith echoed that sentiment.
"Adobe's really been opening up Acrobat," he said. "You found that in Version 6 with the inclusion of more rich media content. Not just movies and sound, but there was SWF and Flash. So you've been finding some convergence there."
Click here to read more about the proposed merger.
Smith added that he feels Acrobat's implementation of XML and Flash together might help the people currently trying to distribute Flash content to mobile devices, making Flash more easily and cleanly deployed with PDF as a launching pad.
Karl De Abrew, founder and CEO of BinaryThing (parent company of software vendor ARTS PDF and the PlanetPDF Web site), was mostly upbeat about the future of a PDF format more tightly integrated with Macromedia's technologies.
He said he sees the potential for a Flash player, PDF reader and a lightweight Web browser such as Firefox rolled up into one next-generation rich-media viewing tool.
If it happens, that could be a good thing for PDF—or not, De Abrew said, because it might be hard for third-party developers to keep up, along with the potential to make the PDF standard less open.
"Adobe built an open specification in PDF and encouraged a whole lot of people to do things with it, and over time it's become more limited," De Abrew said, referring in part to Acrobat 7 Pro's ability to turn on features in the free Reader to enable review and commenting on a per-document basis.
"Shoring up and making PDF a little more proprietary by including these hooks and links into things that, whilst they're not proprietary, are just kind of difficult or awkward or hard for anyone else, in real terms, to use—I think that could prove to be something of a stumbling block."
Acrobat Bible author Ted Padova looks forward to tighter application integration between Flash and PDF authoring, with such potential features as being able to export from Flash to PDF—with the fine output settings control seen in the PDF Maker Office plug-ins or even InDesign.
Padova's feature wish list also includes the ability to edit Flash files embedded in a PDF, save them, and have the PDF update itself with the new file, on the fly.
He added that he would love to see the Adobe user interface imposed on Macromedia applications. In his opinion, such a change would improve their usefulness.
"I find Flash to be a real challenge to work with—intuitively, when I'm looking for a contextual menu or something, it's just not there," Padova said. "I know if it was an Adobe application, it'd be so much easier to travel through."
No one was particularly concerned with the loss of competition between Adobe and Macromedia apps resulting from the merger's market consolidation.
But not everyone could see a lot of potential benefits to Adobe from acquiring Macromedia.
Thom Parker, owner of Windjack Solutions, sees the merger as simply Adobe "eating up more of the media space."
"Flash built into PDF? You can do that already, anyway," he said. "I mean, you didn't have to buy the company for it."
Next Page: Application integration offers interesting possibilities.
Leonard Rosenthol, former Adobe engineer and current owner of PDF Sages Inc., expressed a similar "been there, done that" sentiment: Since Adobe has already included the ability to put Flash animations into PDF, there's not much farther to go, integration-wise.
Unless, of course, Adobe were to do away with the Flash .SWF format and replace it with the open-standard, XML-based "SVG lite" subset of SVG and convert the installed base of Flash Player users to the new format. That would be a major upgrade, in Rosenthol's opinion.
Rosenthol did point out a couple of places where he felt the new Adobe-Macromedia entity might start looking to improve its software.
On the server side, Rosenthol sees interesting things down the road for further integration of PDF with ColdFusion and Dreamweaver.
On the desktop side, he said he thinks if Adobe were to make PDF the native output format for Director, that would make the venerable old multimedia authoring environment all the more powerful.
"PDF is already a wonderful multimedia playback engine, but Adobe's missing that [multimedia] authoring environment, and Director's that authoring environment," Rosenthol said. "From the desktop, I think Director has the biggest impact."
The party line from Adobe two days after announcing the planned merger, understandably, was vague.
"I don't think Adobe themselves know what the future is going to hold," De Abrew said. "A number of interviews with [Adobe CEO] Bruce Chizen that were published reflect exactly that. … He doesn't even know which products will stay, which products will go, and how the technologies will be merged together."
In her keynote speech, Acrobat Marketing Director Pam Deziel did offer a few clues, saying that Adobe would first be "looking at Flash" and how it could benefit Adobe products.
"We also get a big leg up in the mobile space. It's something that we have been focusing on. But Adobe is coming at it from its historical roots [of print and graphics], while Macromedia started on the Web as their original entry point, so there's a lot of potential from that point as well," Deziel said.
"There's a lot of synergy between our product lines, there's very similar cultures, they're just up the road. … We're all pretty excited about the opportunity."
