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

Almost forgot to mention the alternative session yesterday on CIP4. I didn't attend this, but Peter Dyson mentioned discussion on whether JDF information should be part of a PDF or in a related file. He suggested 'One of the files will get lost. You'll give them different names.' I think he was just trying to get a response from the panel, who came up with several ways round this sort of problem.

CIP4 Heidelberg Presentation

The really good news is that there will probably be another Seybold event in Amsterdam. Hans Hartman said that the expectation for a first event was between 200 and 300, so they are pleased with the actual attendance of 450. There is space for maybe four times as many though in the main forum so potential for more people in Europe to hear about this.

http://www.seybold365.com/amsterdam2003/

James King keynote covered ten years of Acrobat and PDF. The original design aims included fitting Acrobat onto one floppy and running on 640k DOS. Now it becomes clear that Amber (version 3) was the first one that did 'the publishing things'. 'Before that, we targeted the office.'

There may be more versions of Acrobat tools, such as the Professional and Standard with Acrobat 6. Apparently the thinking is that "more people could use standard if it wasn't priced so high". Strangely, 6 Standard seems to be more expensive than Acrobat 5 and to not include the forms creation features. Maybe other options will follow later.

The discussion on PDF seems to work well with a basis in European print. The proofing discussion was fairly technical, based around activities of the European Color Initiative.
http://www.eci.org/eng/index_e.html

A rare reference to the internet came through a presentation on WebProof, using Acrobat6 and WebDAV for proofing. Comments can be added outside of Acrobat for those who don't have it.
http://www.webproof.com

The first day included coverage of Enterprise Content Management, something that usually takes several days. It was comprehensive within the time but my surprise was at how little mention there was of the Adobe server software and how PDF could fit with other systems. This did come up, but there was no Adobe presence on this occasion.
http://www.gilbane.com/amsterdam03.html

Tomorrow David Brailsford will be talking about PDF and XML within a stream on the 'data-connected enterprise' . Maybe some of the links to content management will come up there.

There will also be the release of a Seybold survey on PDF usage in Europe. It will be interesting to compare this with the first one based mostly on responses from the USA.

No mention of 'Network Publishing'. Creo spoke about 'Networked Graphic Production' within their seven minutes. So the scope is a bit limited in concentrating on print workflow. Still, this is a solid basis. Maybe web design will creep in as a topic next time.

More follows, maybe Saturday.