|
While
Acrobat sales continued a steep upward trend in 2005,
3rd party applications that can in many (or most) respects
replace Adobe Acrobat have also gained a starting (or
better) position.
Adobe
Systems has made it clear that they want to see
Acrobat on every business desktop. A crucial gap in
their strategy, until now, has been the online universe
of information about Acrobat and PDF. The poorly-structured
Adobe
User-to-User forums don't cut the mustard, which
is why, since 1997, now-established alternatives such
as Planet PDF
and the PDF Zone
became the go-to places for the answer- seeking user
community.
In
launching their own foray into the world of online content
about PDF, Adobe has (naturally) decided to focus on
the specific question of how users can get the most
from Adobe's Acrobat products.
This
is a worthy objective, and Adobe is to be credited with
at least beginning to pay systematic attention to both
getting users the information they want in the way that's
right for them, and facilitating users in finding their
own ways to express their needs.
While
AcrobatUsers.com
is very thin today, a lot of content is in the works,
with veteran PDF journalist and former Chief Editor
for Planet PDF Kurt Foss at the editorial helm. The
site promises to be far more than sophisticated marketing.
It's all about the content, and there's every indication
that Adobe is going to take seriously the task of filling
the chasm- like gap between the average Acrobat user's
knowledge and the application's capabilities.
They
need to. With Microsoft's recent announcement that the
next version of Office will include "native"
conversion to PDF, together with the ground-swell of
3rd party PDF creation and management tools, it's becoming
more important than ever for Adobe to learn about the
real use-cases for Acrobat in diverse and organic ways.
AcrobatUsers.com
will grow over time, adding new features, articles,
Community-building features and meeting opportunities,
interaction with Adobe personnel, and much more. DSI
CEO Duff Johnson will be contributing several articles
to the site, and we'll keep you appraised of those as
they come online.
Visit
AcrobatUsers.com,
and let them know what you think while it's still young!
AcrobatUsers.com
goes live with Duff Johnson's articles
AcrobatUsers.com
has invited Duff Johnson, CEO of Document Solutions,
Inc, to contribute several articles exclusively to this
site. The first two articles were used to inaugurate
the site at it's launch in mid February, 2006.
The
first is a reprise on a very popular theme. PDF files
usually present lousy results to Google and other search
engines, and there's precious little decent information
out there as to why.
In
this article, Duff addresses this issue and delivers
some bottom-line wisdom on how to improve the search-engine
performance of your website's PDFs.
Read
his piece - complete with screen-shots and specific
tips on what and what NOT to do, and how to test your
own website - at AcrobatUsers.com. It's called: Making
your PDFs work well with Google (and other search engines).
Duff's
second piece for the launch of the site revolves around
the issue of "PDF tags" - a subject that often
evokes a blank stare, even amongst seasoned "PDF
people." There are a lot of reasons to know a little
about tags, and the goal of this article is to educate
the user on the structure of PDF, and offer some tips
on how to improve PDF accessibility.
This
piece, What
are “PDF tags” and why should I care?,
offers some history on the evolution of the PDF format,
as well as screen-shots and other resources.
The
Past, Present and Future of PDF
The
PDF format began life as a tool to smooth the publisher-to-press
workflow. Authenticity to both the creator's intent
and to the printed page itself, no matter what operating
system or printer, was everything. The idea that PDF
might be a complete electronic document format in it's
own right came later.
Four
years later - by 1996 or so - it was becoming apparent
that users wanted a great deal more from PDF than a
way to carry an idea through to a printer. Adobe had
introduced a paper-to-PDF solution, the Federal government
was busy creating and posting PDF files in their "electronic
reading room", and the idea of "epaper"
- the electronic equivalent of the paper document -
was moving from infancy to... prepubescence.
Since
1996, and through four major versions of Adobe's now-flagship
Acrobat product since that time, the PDF format has
gained in both stature and capacity. New features, such
as forms, XML metadata, commenting, review, accessibility,
integration into server processes and many other capabilities
have extended the scope of PDF dramatically.
At
this point in time, PDF is, perhaps, a prom queen in
her late teenage years. Widely used and broadly recognized,
PDF's place as an electronic document format assured
- at least for now. There are weaknesses - albeit more
with Adobe Systems than with PDF itself.
Adobe
has a lot of work ahead of them to leverage their position
as bearers of the PDF specification - now a responsibility
akin to a public trust - into a set of products that
not only appeal to user needs, but draw users into exploring
and applying the power of PDF to meet millions of highly
idiosyncratic applications.
In
the future, PDF has the potential to become evermore
a platform in it's own right - a sort of operating system
for documents. Full-scale XML integration lies down
this road, along with the ability to seamlessly convert
from PDF back into source document formats and applications.
Content structure is, in many ways, the final frontier
for PDF development. Once every aspect of a PDF, down
to individual words and images, is easily addressable
by content-management systems, then the PDF format can
truly take the place of a Rosetta stone, the "final-form
source document" for all electronic purposes to
come.
|
