Starting with IPEX 2002, this blog covers events relevant for UK print, including Seybold and DRUPA. See also website at www.atford.co.uk

Monday, October 18, 2010

Print is not a featured feature of Acrobat X

So far I have had a quick look at Acrobat X information. It strikes me that there is no significant mention of print on this release. Strange, as the variable data capability of the Adobe PDF Print Engine is presumably supported. The interface has been redesigned again, possibly making it harder to find the JDF options in the print menu. Just a guess, i will come back to this when I have an actual copy. The reality is, in my honest opinion, that many users of Acrobat still relate to hard copy some of the time. Probably many more than are wanting to wrap existing PDF in a Flash presentation.

So a future task for this blog will be to find the print features and try to promote them. It may be that other software has more focus on this so there will be a comparison.

The best review I can find so for is from Tim Anderson. He has previously attended an Amsterdam meeting for Adobe partners and has also written on how Apple support is limited for forms features of PDF. The "Apple problem" for PDF is similar to the problem with Flash and could get worse if more PDF files include Flash content.  There is a sense that this release is intended to work well with Microsoft products. This could have been a topic during the recent meeting of Steve Ballmer and Shantanu Narayan. It is claimed that moving between Word, Excel and PDF will be even easier.

There is mention of improved collaboration from the Reader. So far I don't know how this is enabled or how widely it will be promoted. One reason the Reader is such a large file is that it has some functions of the full product but they are usually turned off. Many people have found other options for collaborating through documents. Adobe has continued to sell Acrobat to corporates but lost some attention from a wider audience.

Some videos from Acrobat TV



Lori DeFurio on SendNow, a news service from Acrobat.com. Not yet launched, more detail in November.



Brad Arkin on Security. More here about working closely with Microsoft. Some people claim that security concerns are a reason to move to open source.




Ali Hanyaloglu interviews Rick Treitman, Director of Product Management Acrobat Solutions Services.
The cloud is the future but there is more detail to follow.



Kevin Wedman and Kyle Froling of Bureau Veritas, a global leader in delivering quality, health, environment, and safety (QHSE) solutions, visit with Lori DeFurio of Adobe to discuss how enhancements in Acrobat X will further improve collaboration across their project teams, reduce administration costs, and bring greater control to complex engineering and construction workflows.



Joel Geraci talks with Tim Wandell of Universal Mind about his views on Acrobat X. It turns out that code options assume you already know Flash.

I will try to keep an open mind about the Flash future. But my main conclusion at the moment is that PDF support is coming from various sources and PDF may not be the main Adobe focus.