The conference in Washington D.C. will also feature sessions relevant to enterprise IT staff, prepress people and even end users.Adobe—which never misses a chance to make a splash at the annual PDF Conference—plans to launch its first company-sponsored Acrobat user groups at the show, according to sources at Adobe.
Acrobat is one of the few Adobe products for which the company has not sponsored user groups.
While Adobe improves Acrobat every year, companies like Enfocus release even more advanced applications that manage PDF creation and verification within the workflow.
What's more, Adobe may be having a hard time keeping up with the expanding audience that PDFs are reaching in the general office market—hence the user groups.
That growing audience means PDFs show up at all types of businesses and are created by all sorts of programs—free PDF makers downloaded from the Web, PDFs made from printer drivers of obscure layout programs or just badly set up PDFs from the usual sources like Acrobat, InDesign and QuarkXPress.
All these PDFs are prone to problems like mismatched color profiles, incorrect image resolutions or missing fonts.
The PDF Conference, which runs Sept. 26-27 at the Crystal City Hilton in Washington D.C., will speak to all types PDF users, be they desktop users trying to wrangle a readable PDF from a Word file or IT managers from federal agencies who must turn warehouses full of paper records into searchable electronic archives.
One popular topic, according to conference organizer Carl Young, will be implementing JavaScript in forms created in the new Adobe LiveCycle Designer. A workshop on that subject is almost sold out.
Part of the interest, he says, probably comes from curiosity. Designer comes free with Acrobat, so people want to see its potential.
Another group of users, he says, needs to learn how to migrate forms with JavaScript from Acrobat into Designer, and salvage the time and bandwidth devoted to the creation of those forms.
"Adobe hasn't provided a lot of documentation on that, so that's why speaker and WindJack Solutions founder Thom Parker is getting a lot of interest in it," Young said.
Read here about how Adobe recently plugged code execution holes.
Developing quality-assurance programs to improve the likelihood that a large audience will be able to read your PDFs—even if they're using future generations of software—will be the topic of another session.
While Adobe strives to make every PDF ever made openable in the next version of Reader, users are still able to create PDFs that are nearly unreadable.
How's this possible? One big issue is preventing file corruption. Another is fonts. PDFs that need a long shelf life should include embedded fonts—especially those using special character sets such as mathematics type—or risk Adobe Reader's font-substitution features mangling the text when the PDF gets opened on a machine without the specialized font.
Yet another issue is OCR (optical character recognition) for scanned pages to make them searchable in document management systems.
People in charge of converting large repositories of paper into PDFs need to take all this into consideration to keep that content accessible.
"File size is also important—they need to make sure someone didn't scan in a 20-page document at 1,200 DPI, so it's 80 megabytes," Young says.
Young—an Acrobat trainer who often takes the wheel for a session with end users in mind—will debut a new training session dealing with a common PDF problem: Making files created in Microsoft Office turn into quality PDFs.
While styles and templates might be second nature to people in the publishing business, the typical Acrobat office user doesn't think of creating PDFs as "publishing," but instead doing something more along the lines of file conversion.
To read about IBM's challenge to Adobe, click here.
"People don't know how to use styles; people don't know how to use the table of contents creation feature tool in Word," Young said.
"You really have to have all that in there to get a good interactive PDF coming out of Word ... It's a big issue, I'll go [into training sessions] and people will tell me they have tons of Microsoft Word training and I'll say 'OK, how do you do styles?' and they'll look at me like I'm speaking Greek."
For those in the publishing world, the conference will feature the latest technology for efficiently serving files to readers over the Web as well as the ubiquitous prepress problem of fixing bad PDFs en route to press.
Young encourages showgoers to check the PDF Conference site and download programs (naturally, in PDF) in the final days before the show, as his staff continues to update schedules of events as well as descriptions.
Document Management 
