The company combines Jaws PDF Creator and Editor into suites for desktop, server and large-scale enterprise installations.When Global Graphics' Jaws PDF Creator emerged in the 1990s as an inexpensive Acrobat alternative, users wanted a one-trick pony: quality conversion of business and print-destined documents to PDF. Jaws PDF Editor came along later, adding a viewer and features like review and commenting.
The company announced in late October that the two products would be combined into one box, calling it the Jaws Desktop Suite. The companion Jaws Server Suite works for network deployments, and its big brother Jaws Enterprise Suite supports companies whose PDF-generation needs exceed 300 seats and who require maintenance services and other tools.
James Bidewell, Global Graphics director of eDocument technologies sales, said customer demand and channel partners drove the product line restructuring. They indicated a preference for a single license key to use the features of Creator and Editor.
"That's where the suites came from," Bidewell said. "Bringing in the suites we looked at as a chance to revamp the whole product line. The suites cater to the needs of a range of users from the home user and small-office user to medium and larger corporates."
Both Jaws PDF Creator and Editor will remain available as separate stand-alone products for customers who already bought one and need the other.
Office users driving features
Bidewell and Nik Stanbridge, Global Graphics product manager for eDocument technologies, said that business users currently are driving the change of PDF use—and the applications that make them.
In the early days of PDF—say, 10 years ago—developers envisioned PDF as static, electronic versions of paper documents, for archiving, e-mailing, or a final compact file destined for printing presses.
In the enterprise, workgroups now use PDF files as productivity tools, passing them around and collaborating with review and comment strings. This, in turn, spurs software developers to react with features and evolving applications that help office users organize the content in ways they can't with paper.
"The tools we're providing are workflow enablers in its entirety," Stanbridge said. "We're providing tools to create PDFs from any application, whether it's a simple print to PDF or a much richer PDF with bookmarks and hyperlinks, and so on. When they get that PDF, using PDF Editor they can annotate, highlight, strikeout and add sticky notes."
Microsoft XPS looms
Global Graphics had an interesting perspective in the Adobe-Microsoft flap over Microsoft's upcoming PDF-like file format, XPS, as well as its support of PDF in the next version of its Office apps. As a consultant to Microsoft in developing XPS, Global followed closely as the rift between Adobe and Microsoft opened.
While Global seems to be in an excellent position to create a third-party "super-app" that would enable office workers to output their documents to both PDF and XPS—and perhaps convert one to the other when appropriate—Stanbridge and Bidewell confirmed that Global has not integrated XPS support into Jaws.
Furthermore, the company isn't planning to in the short term, at least until the market dictates it's ready for it. A future scenario is possible in which Global makes XPS tools separate from the Jaws line, too, if user demand rose to the level of supporting them.
"Time will tell . . . Global Graphics is considered experts in page-description languages—PDLs—PostScript and PDF at the present time, and XPS as it comes forward," Bidewell said. "We will support all of those PDLs."
Specs in play
One technical evolution Jaws tools—like most non-Adobe products that support PDF—haven't yet embraced? The recent 1.6 and 1.7 PDF specs, released along with Acrobat versions 7 and 8.
The 3-D and multimedia bells and whistles those new specs offer benefit bleeding-edge PDF innovators. Office users, however, probably won't often call for them, making PDF 1.5 a solid, stable spec for everyday applications most users can imagine.
"Users don't have a huge need to maintain congruency with the spec," Stanbridge said.
