Opinion: The IRS' big day is also a big one for Adobe PDF, but it's just the beginning of where the technology is headed, as the PDF 2005 conference agenda shows.Adobe PDF has made light-year leaps in five calendar years, and April 15 has become something of a holiday for aficionados of the format.
This year there's more to celebrate: Taxpayers have downloaded more than 1.5 billion PDF forms from the IRS Web site since 1998, and in 2006 Adobe's 2-D PDF barcode technology will improve accuracy and cut processing time for mail-in returns.
In historical contrast, April 2000 was the cruelest month for PDF.
Industry pundits blasted PDF, surfing the wave of bad publicity surrounding the previous month's release of Stephen King's Riding the Bullet e-book, which is still available for $2.50. Hackers hacked open and circulated free copies of King's "long short" story around the Web, showing it off the way a hunter would mount the rack from a 12-point buck on the wall at the lodge.
These naysayers offered many reasons to dismiss PDF as another cute piece of tech that was useful for graphic designers but allegedly wasn't something that could be scaled up for enterprise use.
Besides, they conjectured, it was only a matter of time before Microsoft Reader would blow Adobe out of the e-book space, and its forms technology InfoPath would soon eclipse PDF for that application, too. What did a graphic-design software company know about competing with Redmond, anyway?
In the five years since, Microsoft Reader has failed to unseat PDF as an e-book technology. And taxpayers can't download an InfoPath version of Form 1040.
How about them apples?
It turns out that PDF security wasn't the problem with e-books; rather, the premise itself was flawed. Arthur Andersen researchers in 2000 estimated a potential $3.4-billion e-book market by 2005. While there are excellent applications for e-books—textbooks seem to be the most useful—the e-book revolution for mass-market fiction never came to fruition for either Microsoft or Adobe.
Riding the Bullet was more than just an e-book, however. It was PDF's coming-out party on the national stage. The fallout from the incident—which continued for years courtesy of the federal trial of Dmitry Sklyarov and his employer, ElcomSoft, which marketed PDF-hacking tools online—gave the technology a black eye. For several years, when people thought "PDF," they also thought "weak security."
But that fallacy is not scaring anyone away anymore. In fact, the IRS uses Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions Server to enable taxpayers to fill out PDF forms electronically and save the data to their local hard drives using the free Adobe Reader. The U.S. departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Education also have deployed PDF in their document workflows, as have NASA, the Postal Service and the Department of Justice.
Just check out the agenda for next week's AGI Adobe Acrobat & PDF Conference and see how government use of PDF pervades the agenda:
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will be showcasing how it integrates PDF into the execution of its mission;
Section 508, covering accessibility of government documents for people with visual disabilities, is again a hot topic;
More sessions will take place about forms than covering prepress issues.
No one is calling PDF foolproof, and no one is sticking a fork in the Microsoft competition to PDF, namely its Reader and InfoPath. But this April 15, the PDF world's got a lot to celebrate. And Bill Gates appears to be farther back in the rearview mirror than he ever was before, as PDF's roots grow deeper and deeper into the IRS, the highest-profile Acrobat installation on earth.
So go ahead, crack open the champagne and launch the confetti. Today's the biggest PDF holiday yet.
Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.
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