Engineers, electronic archivists and the packaging industry are the next target groups on Adobe's radar for Acrobat and PDF.WASHINGTON—The hype around last December's release of Acrobat 7 has died down. Acrobat 8, if it will indeed be called that, isn't far enough along to be previewed in public. In the sleepy time between releases, Adobe revisited history when given the stage for the keynote address at the
ninth PDF Conference, running Monday and Tuesday here at the Crystal City Hilton.
Instead of using the chance to sell showgoers, some of whom would directly benefit, on its new user groups, the company reserved that announcement for Tuesday, when the conference throws its doors open to the public and more people are expected to come.
Read details here about why Adobe's Acrobat user groups announcement is awaited with enthusiasm.
Instead, Evangelist and Senior Systems Engineer Mike Ouslander's presentation cataloged the evolution of Acrobat, dropping a few crumbs about future directions Adobe Systems Inc. will take.
Though Adobe has historically been tight-lipped when it comes to revealing features in development, Ouslander did say that the company is working on integrating PDF/A support into Acrobat.
That fledgling standard helps ensure PDF quality control for archivists, the theory being that cutting down on certain bells and whistles in a PDF document and properly managing fonts will make it more likely that it will be able to be opened years from now and look exactly the same.
Acrobat already features support for PDF/X, a printing industry standard; Ouslander said Adobe is working to support PDF/E, a standard in development for engineering designers. Adobe is also working to get PDF further into printing workflows in the packaging industry, he said.
While these standards and the accompanying Acrobat features may be addressing the needs of certain groups of users, the aggregate effect is that it's difficult to articulate to the uninitiated just what Acrobat does.
"Acrobat's many things to many people," Ouslander told PDFzone after the address. "It's not [something straightforward like a] word processor, where you can say 'this is what it does.' It's a Swiss Army knife, and those blades can be used differently by different groups. It's become a diverse tool set that can meet multiple requirements within an organization."
While PDFs at first might have been simple electronic proxies for pieces of paper, they evolved into searchable e-paper and then "intelligent documents"—Adobe's term for forms and other files that change depending on a user's interaction with them—some of which now have small applications or Web services such as Google search built into the PDF.
Click here to read a review of Acrobat 7 Pro.
Ouslander said that despite all these technological advancements, Acrobat 7 still parallels Adobe co-founder John Warnock's pre-1.0 vision of secure, portable documents that looked the same on screen or paper. Even though Warnock didn't picture the vast array of features and tools contained in today's Acrobat and related applications, his original vision can still be useful today.
"Acrobat's grown so large, it's hard to explain what it does," Ouslander said in the keynote, before an audience of several hundred attendees, many of them from government and enterprise settings. Going over the original concept of Acrobat—a tool with which document consumers can view and print their electronic documents without the original application in which the documents were created—makes it easier to explain all those things it does now.
Afterward, Ouslander said he didn't know the reason Adobe decided not to focus on the new user group plan in the keynote. He says he personally can see the direct benefit of the groups, having helped run a government user's group for two and a half years, and is glad that Adobe has decided to expand the model nationwide.
"It's growing, and it's just been exciting to see the community come together and talk about and learn about Acrobat and PDF," Ouslander said.
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