Gore broke the tension with his lunchtime keynote address. While it dealt with the serious topic of environmental degradation, he lightened things up with his charisma and frequent humor. For starters, he introduced himself by saying "I'm Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States," bringing howls of laughter from the house in reply.

Continuing with a grin and his trademark dry wit, he said, "I don't think that's funny. Put yourself in my shoes. I flew on Air Force Two for eight years, and now I have to take my boots off to get on an airplane."

"I'm a recovering politician, on step nine," he continued in his patented cheery Al Gore deadpan tone, not for a second forgetting he was in Florida, the election battleground that sank his quest for the presidency. "You win some, you lose some, and there's that little known third category."

That, too, got big laughs.

After warming up the crowd, he got serious, presenting a compelling case for fighting global warming. Exhaustive, exhausting, well-researched with statistics and scientific data, his argument in a nutshell: Basically, carbon in the atmosphere from manmade sources is causing record hurricanes in number and force, melting glaciers and record rainfall. Stuff we've heard before, but he's got startling numbers and the scientific community backing him up. The effects, he says, are reposnsible for extinction of wildlife, dying coral reefs, bigger and hotter wildfires and the breeding of new human diseases.

He called the current administration—as well as right-wingers in the news media who deny global warming exists in the same way some physicians denied smoking caused cancer three decades ago—to task for its lack of action on the gathering storm of environmental problems, and he did a little bit of preaching about this generation's responsibility to the future. Left unchecked, he predicts that global warming could make 450 million "climate refugees" relocate due to flooding.

While right-wing pundits slammed Gore in 2000 for being "wooden" and lacking personality, this speech—what amounted to a 90-minute heavy science class—was riveting. There were no Blackberrys going off, no cell phones bleeping, no idle chatter and no catcalls from the peanut gallery when he took some partisan rips at the Bush administration.

Gore called upon everyone in the audience to develop a "new relationship with the Earth," and take personal responsibility for doing what each one of us can to stifle the trend of throwing more carbon into the air. After Gore's moving, forceful conclusion, the only people who wouldn't be moved into immediately surveying their own lives and cutting out all the waste they could would be Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Satan himself.

Yet we got no reference to PDF, with the exception of a throwaway joke around the time he outlined the alarming deforestation of South America. There were plenty of opportunities for Gore's team and AGI show organizer Chris Smith to have slipped him some lines about paperwork reduction and how much work we have left to go, considering how we're still surrounded by paper even though Acrobat 8 and a host of cheap or free utilities make it easier than ever to PDF a document instead of printing it.

Smith, who chose a handful of audience-submitted questions for Gore, kept the post-keynote Q&A pretty lightweight. He threw softballs about the iPhone (Gore sits on Apple's board of directors) as well as asking him how we can fight global warming in our own lives (learn as much as you can—it's the moral challenge of our time—drive hybrid cars and go carbon-neutral when possible).

The one piece of advice Gore gave to the audience of creative professionals that actually spoke to them, specifically? Help your local environmental group get their message out, using your design skills, because they need you. Fair enough. Then the questions veered off to other pressing matters, such as the resolution of the recent solar panels flap at his Nashville home in the upscale Belle Meade neighborhood.

The morning kicked off with another keynote, this one sponsored by Disney, which was touted as a way to inspire organizations to find their identity and better succeed in business. The speaker, a Disney lifer, wasn't afraid to get a few laughs at the expense of Disney's legendarily friendly-to-a-robotic-fault employees—whom they refer to as "cast members"—en route to an entertaining presentation about finding ways for every employee to improve business practices, no matter where they live in the organizational chart.

Not, as many in the audience might have expected, a more technical overview of how Disney leverages software such as InDesign, Acrobat, QuarkXPress or even LiveCycle forms tools to maintain its design integrity and company personality through the billions of paper and online transactions it must conduct on a yearly basis throughout its resort and amusement-park empire.

While the keynotes did veer a little bit far afield from the main topics people came to hear about, the other sessions made up for it: Elan's Mike Jahn came out of a long hiatus to demonstrate how to create cleaner e-books and print-on-demand publications with PDF; new Adobe PDF Standards evangelist Leonard Rosenthol gave attendees updates on the development of PDF/X, PDF/A, PDF/E, and efforts to get the entire PDF spec approved by ISO; and both GATF expert Julie Shaffer and Adobe principal scientist Dov Issacs updated their standby "making better PDF" presentations to include Acrobat 8 features.

rIsaacs also gave an overview of his pet project, the PDF Print Engine, a new set of OEM drivers that promises to make PDFs rip more accurately on machines that have it.

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