Opinion: The engineering elves at ActivePDF might only be looking out for No. 1 in creating PrimoPDF 2.0 freeware, but they and their freeware-making confreres are Bill Gates' real enemies in the document wars, not Adobe and its "Cadillac**QTPDF pervades the typical office worker's hard drive: Brochures here, forms there, faxes, memos, scans of magazine pages or e-newsletters in brilliant color everywhere … in PDF format.
Read 'em on screen or print them out—either way they look great. Sort your e-mail attachments by file type and you'll probably see at least a hundred PDFs there. Go to your Internet downloads folder—there will be another bushel basket of PDFs.
Chances are, not all of them originated in Adobe Acrobat. Maybe not even half.
Many software companies release Acrobat competitors, from basic print driver utilities to standalone applications.
I say "Acrobat competitors" with a wink. No one single application can match Acrobat's prepress file diagnostics and its review-and-markup capabilities, let alone such features as the engineering document measurement tools, sophisticated Web capture feature suite or integration with Microsoft Office applications.
I've yet to meet one single user who needs every one of those features, either.
All the little PDF freebies out there have one very important thing in common with Acrobat: They make PDFs. Start with a Word or Excel file, output as PDF. Simple stuff, but just like karaoke made a million dreamers into rock stars, this freeware turns everyone into PDF publishers. It's so cool that Steve Jobs made it an OS-level feature on the Macintosh platform.
After observing the PDF world over the years—and witnessing the major enthusiasm our site visitors show when we talk about free software—I'm certain that if Microsoft wants to kill PDF (and I believe it desperately does, whether it's with Metro or some yet-to-be-revealed technology), it shouldn't be fighting a war against Adobe.
Bill Gates and Co. should be fighting the little guys who make free PDF creation software. They're the ones doing the heavy lifting, showing people how handy PDF can be when they make it a part of their work communications tool set.
Free tools can only take a person so far; users get hooked and then realize they can't live without some major feature missing in the freeware and that only comes in commercial boxes such as Jaws PDF Creator/ActivePDF Composer, ARTS Nitro PDF, ScanSoft PDF Converter, or even Acrobat.
Click here to read reviews of Nitro and PDF Converter.
Adobe has taken some lumps over the years for the way it's handled some Acrobat features, spun off products, and gone about its mergers and acquisitions. But no one can argue that its decision to make the PDF spec publicly available paved the way for PDFs to permeate the electronic communications tapestry in which we live and work.
Which brings us to ActivePDF, which soon—maybe even this week—will release PrimoPDF 2.0, an upgrade to its free PDF creation utility.
Next Page: Product branding is one way that PrimoPDF pays off for ActivePDF.
What is a company that is known for server-side applications that chuck out thousands of PDFs doing mixing it up with low-budget developers, some of whom are cranking out glorified print drivers from their basements?
"Product branding," says ActivePDF owner Tim Sullivan, who estimates that the free PrimoPDF 1.0 made it onto a million hard drives, which was his goal. It's hard to tell with a free product because it gets passed along via CD-ROMs and other Web sites.
He does know his site's PrimoPDF page got more than a million hits in its first year, and anecdotal evidence shows that PrimoPDF is popular in places where budgets are tight—such as universities—some of which standardized on PrimoPDF instead of other freeware or even commercial apps. Sullivan attributes the success to cheap, word-of-mouth advertising.
The 2.0 upgrade features a revamped, more Windows-like interface as well as 128-bit encryption and other enhancements that make the PDFs it creates more like the ones that can be output from Acrobat.
One feature that won't be in PrimoPDF 2.0 is a nagging registration dialog box that pops up after 10 uses; in 1.0, most people escaped out of it. It was the only source of user complaints, Sullivan says.
He still hasn't figured out how to create direct income streams from PrimoPDF. The hope was that Primo users would eventually need more features and buy ActivePDF Composer, but that never really happened.
Click here to read about an architectural firm that is doing much of its PDF creation with a $10 tool.
PrimoPDF 2.0 will also see release in a couple of commercial flavors, including single boxes available from resellers that include macros for Office apps, and a customizable "enterprise" edition that companies can license and on which they can insert their own logo. One major client in the financial industry already signed up for its own enterprise license for PrimoPDF 2.0, Sullivan says.
But when it gets down to brass tacks, PrimoPDF 2.0 might end up being as much a labor of love as the original. Sullivan sees value in that, knowing that ActivePDF is helping to keep PDF growing in the world of small, ad-hoc document workflows, where people haven't yet stepped up to Acrobat—let alone begun to comprehend the magic of server software that can handle mass PDF throughput from companies like Adobe, Appligent and his own.
With PrimoPDF, he's helping stock the pond with fry in hopes that he'll hook them later as full-grown customers. He's also doing his part to support the PDF ecosystem as a whole, in hopes of choking out whatever Microsoft is trying to accomplish with Metro or the next "PDF killer" that Redmond might be hatching.
"It's not a major resource burden for ActivePDF to do this. We only have one primary developer on it," Sullivan says. "The benefit to ActivePDF is, obviously, the branding and pushing PDF as the standard.
"Especially with Microsoft coming out with their 'PDF killer.' You never know—they have something up their sleeve. With [Metro] coming out and it being free, embedded and accessible to developers, a free PDF writer is needed more than ever to compete with that."
