It seems that Jakob Nielsen did not mention PDF in particular as part of his keynote. I spoke to someone who was there and nothing striking is remembered about PDF. There is a lot of PDF evident in the exhibition. The British Library are still offering to email a PDF of any document within two hours to anywhere. They have to scan it each time. The publishers apparently would not like the idea of a store of scans. There is an additional charge of a copyright fee so the publishers are benefiting from the service. The PDF is tied to a particular computer so cannot be copied to another screen. Only two printout copies can be made. There is a problem for people who do not realise that they need the latest version of the Reader for the Digital Rights Management aspect to work. Sometimes people with earlier versions complain that something has gone wrong. I guess Jakob Nielsen would call this a 'usability' issue. Somehow people get used to it however.

No sign of Adobe or the 'intelligent document platform'. Documentum are sposoring some of the talks on content management but have no information on the PDF server software except that if pressed they state that it does work. This is arguably the most relevant UK show for intelligent documents. M aybe Adobe believe their message will get across online anyway. What appears from the show so far is that XML is the main format people wanr to work with. PDF is attractive for publishing when the design is fixed and security is required.

More on 'e-publishing' tomorrow. Theatre B, starts around 10.30

On Wednesday there will be a question time at the House of Commons organised by IP3, the new institute formed by merging Paper, Publishing and Printing. One consequence of the merger is that web publishing is now part of the debate. One question is expected to be 'is the printed book dead?' The answer will be no, probably, but it is interesting that the question is being asked.

http://www.ip3.org.uk/commonsdebate.htm

More on this later in the week.