PDFs on the rebound
December 15, 2010 —
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Who would have thought the humble PDF would become so ubiquitous, or that tools for managing PDFs could be so powerful?
It’s been a tumultuous year for a file format that prefers a low profile. In early 2010, Adobe’s Portable Document Format, an ISO standard since 2008, made security headlines when it was named a vector for the Aurora attack spread via social engineering and possibly launched by Chinese spies.
Despite that setback, the PDF creation and conversion market is burgeoning thanks to corporate document workflow applications, government digital archiving efforts, the proliferation of e-books and mobile devices, and a “greening” of the office.
Andrew Cochran, founder of CeTe Software and a 10-year PDF components veteran, predicted, “The PDF market’s not going to disappear anytime soon.”
A flexible new Acrobat
PDF’s ascendancy comes down to “today’s critical challenge of communicating and collaborating with widely dispersed teams of colleagues, partners and customers,” said Kevin M. Lynch, vice president and general manager of Adobe Acrobat. As document life-cycle management grows ever more important, however, the channel is changing from e-mail and servers to content hubs a la Microsoft SharePoint, integrated workflow solutions or even cloud offerings such as Acrobat.com services.
When it comes to PDF, start with the mother ship: Adobe Acrobat. Launching its10th version in November, the company has fully bridged the corporate and creative ends of its product line with Acrobat X.
How? Acrobat X achieves the impossible by making PDFs seem positively fun. Now, users can create PDFs from Web pages; create fillable forms; seamlessly add multimedia or Flash content to Microsoft Office files or in PDFs before exporting to Office; search paper scans; add comments to embedded videos at precise frames; and send large files using Adobe Send Now. The new Acrobat has an improved OCR engine, plus options for saving smaller files than ever before. Perhaps the piece that’s drawn the most attention is Acrobat’s PDF Portfolios feature.
Introduced with Acrobat 9, PDF portfolios, which combine PDFs, forms, HTML and multimedia in an attractive full-screen format, have undergone an extreme makeover in Acrobat 10. While they’re currently only viewable in Adobe Reader 9 or higher, Acrobat X can export a portfolio as a website for Flash-capable browsers. For now, portfolios are unique to Acrobat.
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