PDF News and Tips
April, 2005

PDF Meets Section 508: Duff Johnson presents at AGI's Acrobat and PDF Conference

On April 21st, in Orlando, Florida, DSI's CEO Duff Johnson will present PDF Meets Section 508, a talk for document authors and managers on the impact of Section 508 on PDF content.

Since 2001, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act has required the Federal government and its contractors to provide electronic content in a manner that's accessible to all users. State and local governments are now following with their own regulations to facilitate equal access to published and internal documents by disabled users.

With 10 million visually impaired and up to 70 million with disabilities in the U.S. alone, accessible content is more than just a mandate for government agencies, it's good business as well. Ensuring compliance with Section 508 requires a new focus on matters of design and execution. In this session, Johnson discusses the challenges in making PDF content accessible and compliant with Section 508, including the new Accessibility features in Acrobat 7.0.

The "Alchemist of Paper"

The Economist is one of the savviest news and business publications in the world. Now with a circulation of over 1,000,000 in the United States alone, the news reported and opinions expressed in this trenchant weekly are read by movers and shakers from Anchorage to Miami.

In a recent column, the Economist takes a look at the fortunes and future of PDF technology as seen through the lens of Adobe Systems' CEO, Bruce Chizen.

Tracing the history of PDF from it's prepress origin to today's goliath electronic paper technology, the Economist notes that the big-picture concept behind Adobe's innovation with PDF was to bridge paper and electronic information systems.

Adobe, it is fair to say, is engaged in reinventing both paper AND the printing press.

The Economist notes, with trademark deadpan wit, the risks if "Microsoft notices" Adobe's success with PDF. Microsoft's R&D budget alone is larger - a lot larger - than Adobe's current annual revenues!

Chizen focuses, as he should, on the upside. His contention that Adobe Reader, like Windows itself, can be a platform for business applications in its own right, is not new. Many in the 3rd party PDF community (your correspondent included) have been making this point for years. Now that Adobe has turned its focus to documents over artwork, one can only hope Adobe executes the business platform vision as successfully as they did their graphics and print-oriented origins.

Read "The Alchemist of Paper" on the Economist website.

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Duff Johnson reviews Aerialist Professional for Planet PDF

With the introduction of Aerialist Standard in 2004, ARTS PDF combined and updated many of the desktop publishing features from their other products to produce a one-stop-shopping solution that fills many of the (remaining) gaps in Acrobat.

With the release of Aerialist Professional, ARTS PDF has added depth to Aerialist's essentials. The software includes a new Batch Processing engine, support for Layer creation and management, an advanced Table of Contents generator and a host of other nifty features.

In this review, Duff Johnson discusses the highlights of this powerful new software... and shares a few gripes as well.

Read Duff's review of Aerialist Professional on Planet PDF.