Document managers and designers from the old-school Acrobat world are taking notice of former Macromedia tools and test-driving them.Early Acrobat adopters looked upon PDF as electronic paper, static but less tree-killing than the pulp variety. Then in the mid- and late 1990s, they amped up their documents with form fields and multimedia wrinkles.
In 2007, the Acrobat community's gotten a year of Acrobat 8 under its collective belt and has taken time to consider the fruits of the Adobe-Macromedia merger and the recent rev of apps coming out of it. Integrating Adobe Flex, Flash and ColdFusion looks to be the next frontiers into which PDF users can expand functionality and utility of their documents.
PDF vets intrigued with the prospect of building sexy Flex apps that can do things like generate PDFs and manage form data on the fly can check out sessions at the upcoming PDF Central conference Oct. 23 and 24 in Omaha, Neb. Stacey Sell, president of show host Tech Ed Solutions, says she and her colleagues added Flex sessions from attendee feedback from last year's show.
"We've added quite a few topics that include integration of other [Adobe] products such as Flex and ColdFusion—and we've added several hands-on sessions where people can work through the exercises, instead of just all demos," Sell says.
Keynote speakers at the conference include Adobe's Ali Hanyaloglu, an Acrobat team veteran and past technical evangelist who currently works on the Acrobat Customer and Field Enablement team. Co-keynote speaker Donald Costello, senior lecturer Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, offers an overview of the history of IT with a focus on how PDF figures into it.
The show covers forms in detail, with separate sessions for attendees who have built their workflows via Acrobat as well as for others cooking LiveCycle-ready forms with Adobe Designer. For the uninitiated who don't really get the differences between the two robust forms of technologies, longtime PDF book author Ted Padova will lead a session outlining the details between the two.
Several other sessions give attendees a long-view look on developing technologies:
• A session on AIR (formerly called Apollo) offers demos of runtime Flex apps that interact with PDFs in browsers sans Adobe Reader.
• Canadian multimedia guru Bob Connolly offers two sessions on integrating video and Flash animation with PDFs, and will demo their creation in InDesign.
• How to make all this hot stuff accessible to visually handicapped PDF consumers, especially if your documents fall under federal Section 508 accessibility regulations.
Acrobat-specific sessions will focus on the most useful new features in Acrobat 8. Sell says that in Tech Ed's experience--the company focuses on Acrobat and PDF training in between its annual conference--its customers say the most useful features Adobe added in version 8 include:
• Redaction (blacking out) of information in PDFs.
• New forms capabilities that give Acrobat users a limited taste of the enterprise-class LiveCycle server workflow software by unlocking key features in Reader.
• PDF packages, in which PDF authors can add whole Microsoft office and other documents in a password-protected bundle that can be separated later by a document's consumers.
