Don Fluckinger

At the PDF Conference in Washington, D.C. this week I walked the halls searching for an answer to this question: Now that IBM is getting into forms through two initiatives—acquiring PureEdge and a separate piece on the mobile side—how will the industry respond? Granted, the forum was a PDF show, so soliciting opinions on forms […]

Adobe and Macromedia plan to merge. Thats an interesting notion, when one considers that very few pieces of software are more widely distributed than Adobe Reader. In acquiring Flash Player, Adobe now owns one of them. That makes CEO Bruce Chizen—not, contrary to popular belief, Howard Stern—the would-be King of All Media. At times over […]

The free Adobe Reader is everywhere! PDFs are easy to make! Everyones doing it! Because of that, PDFs are getting a bad rep in certain tech circles. The argument goes something like this: Writing in to a Ziff Davis Media sister site, Microsoft Watch, a reader proclaimed PDFs a “plague on the Internet.” His main […]

Got RAID? If youre running Acrobat 7 with an array, and youre having activation issues, youre not alone. The blogospheres jumping, and an Acrobat customer e-mailed us about the problem, in which Adobes activation scheme mistook his Level 1 RAID system—a scheme in which a system stores data on multiple hard drives simultaneously for backup […]

Professionals working in engineering and CAD across industries—from architecture and construction to manufacturing—could have an international PDF standard in the next couple of years, if a committee developing the PDF/E standard can iron out issues such as implementing 3D, digital signatures and rights management. This week represents a milestone for PDF/E, as the U.S. wing […]

The Google Desktop utility went live Monday, after about a six-month beta cycle. The 1.0 release supports PDF search, for the first time. Moreover, ScanSoft has brought to market a beta plug-in called OmniPage Search Indexer that not only supports PDFs containing text, but also can OCR and index image-based PDFs with scanned text and […]

In talking to the enterprise world, Adobe likes to use the “secure container” metaphor for PDF. This idea, that the data contained in a password-protected PDF is safe and secure, isnt complicated, but by the time you toss in the concepts of document workflow, server-side encryption and “policies” served, it is way over the head […]

The history of Acrobat Elements in brief: The PDF world went collectively slack-jawed when it found out that Adobe had been test-marketing something referred to as “Acrobat Lite” in Europe during the year preceding Acrobat 6s release. When Adobe released that test product as Acrobat Elements 6, though, many potential users couldnt get the software, […]

Not only did Acrobat 7 get a makeover late last year, but so did the 1.6 PDF spec and many of the LiveCycle PDF server products. And, dont forget, many third-party software developers of plug-ins and stand-alone utilities and applications have either announced updates based on the new Adobe software or will soon. So lots […]

Adobe isnt the only game in town when it comes to PDF forms: ActivePDF, Amgraf, Cardiff and ScanSoft also offer various tools to convert paper processes to PDF. But one interesting new wrinkle that likely will generate interest in Acrobat 7 involves dynamic forms, which are smart forms capable of updating themselves based on user […]