Any Internet user who has a conscience—or at least wants a message to be heard—knows that the less bandwidth one uses, the more people will pay attention. Or look at a page. Or download a file.

An entire culture has sprung up around making PDFs smaller, from features Adobe has built into Acrobat to third-party applications such as Apago's PDF Enhancer, among others.

So, what's Toronto publisher Dan Brill thinking of when he cranks out issues of his Graphic Exchange (gX) quarterly as 80MB PDF files? And why have 10,000 people so far found the fall 2004 issue interesting enough to download their own copy, three out of four of them choosing the heavy version and not the "lite" alternative?

The short answer is that it's a great show. Brill stretches the boundaries of PDF, packing in as much rich media content as possible: animations, sound files, even QuickTime VR presentations. Those who download Brill's monster PDFs don't get a shell of an issue, a file that points to streaming content hosted by remote servers. Instead, they get the whole thing, content embedded.

He's also giving us mere mortals who make our mundane text-and-graphics PDFs a glimpse of how we'll all think of the format in the future—as a container for more than just the electronic equivalent of static paper pages.

We caught up with Brill on the eve of the Adobe-sponsored Partners in Publishing conference Jan. 20 in New York, where he will be demonstrating his rich-media PDFs.

Don Fluckinger: PDF as a rich-media container? Why not some other format?

Dan Brill: There isn't much of a choice. Give me a list of all the formats in the world where you can include rich media: You can have all your fonts, words and pictures looking exactly the way they're supposed to; you can put it on a Web site; and you can print it out and it looks great.

What are my choices? Macromedia is only paying lip service to the Mac community, and the Mac community may be small, but it's not small on my side of the business. We Mac people are largely responsible for the graphics in the world.

Fluckinger: Some Mac Acrobat users complain they're getting the short end of the stick, feature-wise. Adobe says it's because of Microsoft's lag in features between Windows and Mac versions of Office. What's your take?

Brill: There is a weak-sister kind of a thing to the Mac side; we're going to have to accept that for the moment. I trust—OK, I don't trust, I gave up on trusting anybody—Adobe. They're running PDF, and I'm not going to get into the Mac-Windows thing; I'm not going to say the glass is half-empty.

I like Adobe's model and I think they're building an intelligent model, they've got their business. Even if I don't like what they're doing, why don't we just accept that and move on? On the Mac side, what are we missing? To me, the rich media stuff, and that's missing [on the Windows side, too]. I have faith that Acrobat 8 is going to deal with that.

Fluckinger: How can Acrobat users on the street follow gX's example and add rich-media elements to their own PDFs?

Brill: First of all, just by playing with gX in rich PDF, they can see how even adding basic interactive elements to a PDF, like Web links and automatic e-mail message boxes and QuickTime videos, can transform a static page into a dynamic, multidimensional screen experience that compares favorably to a Web page, but is so much easier to do.

Simply having the ability to present pages in full-screen format can create a much more powerful impression. But there are so many other ways that a PDF can be enhanced to provide a rich user experience.

I think the main message that the "user on the street" should realize about PDF today is that it isn't your father's PDF. Rich PDF is on the verge of becoming a global standard for delivering rich media pages of every description; it's the confluence of print, the Web and TV, all in one file format.

Fluckinger: Where do they start?

Brill: My only complaint with Adobe is that they haven't made it especially easy for beginners to dig right into rich PDF creation. Having said that, anybody can read the "Adding Navigation" and "Adding Buttons and Media Clips" sections, for instance, in the online Acrobat Help, and start to get a feel for how to add rich media.

[In Acrobat], figuring out how a particular function works, or which thing does what, or where certain functions are hidden, is about as clear as mud, and it takes too much trial and error to see how things work. Which, I suppose, is why not that many people are building rich PDFs.

Fluckinger: What, then, would be an alternative?

Brill: To me, the ideal place to begin is InDesign. [Its] rich media tools are not nearly as intimidating as Acrobat's, although far less powerful, but once you get a basic understanding of the rich media terminology and tools in InDesign, you can move into Acrobat with a bit more familiarity.

Although I certainly have no special inside information, I would be shocked if Adobe's master plan isn't to incorporate a full suite of easy-to-use rich PDF creation tools into Acrobat 8, as well as expanding both InDesign's and Photoshop's rich PDF generation capabilities, by the time the next product cycle comes around (after the impending CS2 release this quarter), which by my calculations will more than likely be by the end of 2006. By then, with the current pace of evolution in broadband and PCs, I think users should be ready for it.