Michael Ninness, InDesign senior product manager, says these additions will help enable designers—who typically aren't as well-versed in Flash as their developer peers—to create interactive versions of print PDFs that are a digital end product themselves, with buttons and page transitions that never were intended to be printed.

"Consumers want a mix of media, and while we don't think print is dead, we think that print-only is something publishers aren't doing anymore," Ninness says. "That changes what our customers are asking of us in order to publish to multiple media..., They're saying 'Hey, we've got an extensive staff that knows CMYK, output issues, and everything related to a PDF workflow. How do we train our staff to do interactive and online content as well?'"

Such files—in some cases, alternative versions of print publications—are already finding their way online at proprietary magazine sites like Better Homes & Gardens, digital newsstands that use simple Flash editions of PDF files of print magazines on behalf of publishers such as Zinio, or libraries open to all like Issuu.com.

New InDesign features like Flash output and conditional text enable quick creation of multiple versions of content. The latter allows text—such as weblinks or hyperlinks to other content within the file—to be hidden or shown with a click depending on whether the content's final destination is print or onscreen.

Embedding Flash content in PDFs, Ninness says, will enable consumers to access content offline via Adobe Reader 9 that previously was cached and then discarded by Web browsers. Reader 9 is the first version with the Flash player embedded—a crucial point, Ninness says, because previous versions of Reader converted SWF to QuickTime before playing the media, stripping out interactive elements and other goodies that can be built into Flash files but not into QuickTime video.

Adobe also beefed up InDesign's features for designers creating PDFs for print workflows, its traditional user base. One suite of features that printers—used to getting error-ridden files downstream from designers—will rejoice in learning about is "live preflight," where designers get error messages upon putting in graphics incompatible with the press or introducing other elements in a file that can result in glitches on the printed page.

While InDesign's preflight tools aren't as robust as the deep suite of features in Acrobat, Markzware's FlightCheck, or Enfocus PitStop, Ninness says the InDesign team consulted with PDF workflow experts to make sure its new preflight suite addresses the most common mistakes designers make in building their files. There will also be opportunities for third parties—be they printers or software developers—to hook their respective preflight technologies into InDesign.

"We wanted to leave it open for the market to extend and add on to this," Ninness says.

What about Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash alternative, which isn't yet supported in either InDesign or Acrobat? Some conspiracy theorists outside of Adobe believe that's a deliberate move to limit the reach of Silverlight and force developers to take sides. A separate group of pundits argue that when customers demand Silverlight support, Adobe will hardwire InDesign and Acrobat to accommodate it.

Ninness says the latter is the case: If and when customers request the capability of wrapping Silverlight content inside PDFs, Adobe will make it happen.

"We certainly aren't going to do that proactively if our customers aren't asking for it," Ninness says. "We have our own file formats to support, and that's what our customers are asking us to focus on. That could change, but it certainly isn't the case today."