The good news is that the dates for Seybold Amsterdam 2004 are confirmed as April 19-22. Actually the exact days may change so check http://www.seybold365.com

I think the bad news is turning out to be the wasted opportunity caused by limited input from Adobe. The opening keynote from James King was universally appreciated and covered the history of establishing Acrobat as is already well known. Information on new server software came up by accident or not at all. The Gilbane Content Management day had no Adobe speakers. The track on 'PDF in the Data-Connected Organization' did include a demonstration of Readerr Extensions from Frank Delanghe for D Soft. However this was almost at the end of the conference so no links back to the content management discussion were possible.

www.dsoft.be

In the closing 'interactive expert panel', Stephen Jaeggi added his own wish for a better PDF future. The charging model for Reader extensions is prohibitive for any situation other than really large rich organisations such as government. He would like to see some way of charging per view that made wider use possible. The impression that came over is that Reader extensions software is not really intended to be used at this time.

www.prepress.ch

Maybe it is hard to co-ordinate the Adobe budgets for a European event so it is good that Seybold have given lots of notice for the next event.

More came out about the discussion on whether JDF informatioin should be embedded in PDF or sent in another file. Margaret Motamed , who presented the CIP4 day, put the question back to the expert panel, suggesting that either approach could be used. Menno Mooij suggested that actually people should do both. Then the people closer to the RIP could do a comparison. Either way, a PDF/JDF workflow will be clarified by the next Seybold Amsterdam.

More follows, sometime next week