I had flu last week so am just catching up with things.

Printweek (6 July) had a news item about the Microsoft response to discussion with Adobe on PDF and XPS. Quite strange this as Jack Schofield for one commented on this news in the Guardian June 8th.

The reason for sudden interest could be a technical comment from Simon Eccles, based around the story. "XPS is designed to allow decent typography and real ICC-based colour management. Hooray. No more ghastly customer-supplied Word docs with bizarrecolour palettes and random line endings."

In brief, any way to get from desktop to plate with mimimum hassle is to be welcomed.

Stangely however, Simon Eccles concludes by stating that although service bureaus may start to receive XPS files in about six months time, "whether they'll be able to output them is another question."

Surely the print industry will see this one coming? When has pre-press held back just because the customers have yet to form an orderly queue and reach agreement amongst themselves on exactly what they are demanding?

Could it be as easy as 'place as XPS' on a menu somewhere? Is there a plug-in company looking at this?

The Simon Eccles article makes no mention of Global Graphics although they developed XPS for Microsoft. Presumably they have some ideas on how to connect with a RIP.

Whatever happens with Adobe and Microsoft, my impression is that for the bulk of documents coming out of Offices it should be more or less an open standard to store a pge edescription and get it printed. Adobe can't expect to sell full Acrobat to everyone just to create PDF. Sometime next year things may be a bit clearer.

Let us hope Printweek reports on a lot more detail. There could be some developments.

There has been a really helpful response on Adobe blogs from Mike Potter.

This is the best explanation I have found so far on how LiveCycle and FLEX compare in the Adobe scheme of things.

However, my conclusion is that LiveCycle is now intended for a very niche approach where document control is mandated or the look or print is a legal requirement. the energy is with FLEX. Comments from Jeff on the blog seem fair enough -

Jeff — 04:45 PM on July 10, 2006
I don't understand the need for pdf forms at all. To me, pdf is good, very good infact, for one thing, and one thing only, output.

It also appears that 'Apollo' is mostly about making offline work possible with Flash applications. It may not have much to do with developments in the PDF format.

So what is new with Acrobat 8 ? Time will tell.

I am still none the wiser about Flx or apollo as either appear in the Acrobat 8 story.

However I have found some helpful messages from the Flex end of the discussion.

Am I being a bit rude in suggesting that Adobe believes in segmented marketing and targeted messages? Maybe the confusion is just in my own head, but I can't help thinking that some guidance on Flex and LiveCycle would be helpful. If the LiveCycle prices are not adjusted soon there needs to be some good reason not to move along with Flash. OK you used to like paper based design.

Sorry, put that last sentence down to my current confusion. Of course there is a case for server based PDF software. One day Adobe will explain where this fits with Flex.

At Life Bytes (local web access point) on Friday I happened to see an example of an invoice generating webpage using PHP and FPDF. Fairly simple design but it worked really well. A4 PDF from a text file of data. At a time when the Flex SDK is free and I think one CPU is free as well something like that, anything to hold some attention for server PDF is worth promoting. Surprising really that the Adobe blogs don't promote FPDF.

Lawrence Wallis in today's Printweek is realistic about change and the headline even finds a welcome for changes in technology. It is suggested that moving upmarket to higher quality is only a short term remedy when new techniques become possible. Two examples are given. "Most seismic was the onset of desktop publishing (DTP) in 1985 that rocked and destabilised the prevailing pre-press establishment." There, that is enough direct quoting. You can't just copy stuff out of Printweek as if it was something from the blog of Roy Greenslade.

The second example given is colour repro on personal computers sometime later. Once described as "good enough" this is now apparently widely accepted.

There is still professional pre-press of course but at IPEX the term most widely used was "pre-media". There is still some video editing kit that is not available at Currys Digital.

But for DTP it is now possible to imagine that the technology available at home is good enough for most purposes. Amazon probaly stock most of what anyone would need.

Adobe have announced Flex 2 alongside an updated Flash. This is for 'rich internet applications' and links to XML data on the server. I don't understand when or why to prefer it to LiveCycle and PDF. I am getting more and more confused about Adobe. I have written a sort of report on Acrobat Services dotcom but it is pretty clear this is not based on any info about wher LiveCycle may be going.

Roy Greenslade has responded to my earlier post about his new blog. Briefly my request is that he should find some way to do an updated version of the circulation studies he used to do in the print version of the Guardian media pages.

For one thing he is fairly well placed to guess at what a business model might be like in the minds of people at the Guardian or Telegraph. Sometime later ABC will be allowed to publish some joined up figures.

Below is a complete cut and paste from his blog and my comment

-----

One final noteworthy comment came from ipex2002 who offered me a "big welcome as a blogger" and said I showed "much understanding for the blogosphere". Then he added:


"Unfortunately I find the blog is made up of too many short items. I was hoping for something like the analysis Roy Greenslade used to do of circulation figures for newspapers. The ABC numbers could be compared over the years and made some sense of where each newspaper was going."
I'm happy to say, ipex2002, that I plan to do just that in future. As soon as the monthly figures are released I'll run an analysis. Some might feel this to be a bit "old media", but print newspapers remain influential and, anyway, charting their sales decline is more than a nod to new media's growing importance. I've also been pushing for a coherent and authoritative monthly audit of newspapers' online hits and quantity of users. There's a lot going on on that front and the council of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) is trying to work out a way of providing a regular chart.

--------

my comment


Roy,

Thanks for responding to the request in the IPEX2002 blog. What I would really like is some industry agreed business model that showed how a news organisation was doing in each context, print circulation and online stats. I realise this is asking a lot. If there is a business model nobody is too open on what it is. ABC seem to find it hard to get agreement on what to publish. The 'digital editions' were I thought ok to add to print circulation figures, but no newspaper seems to have done this.

Still, I think this is the way your blog is going and the fact that you now concentrate online says something about trends.

I don't read all of your blog, but Technorati seems effective enough to find mentions of IPEX2002...

Best

Will

Will Pollard (will787 on Guardian talk)

I suppose proper journalists report actual news as they have sources. In a blog it is ok to just ask a question and confess to ignorance.

What is supposed to be good about Acrobat 8.0 ? Apparently it will appear in the fourth quarter of this year. This is June, the summer drift has started, at least for me, but still as memory serves on the previous seven occasions there was some kind of rumor as to what to expect.

Having listened to a webcast of the recent briefings for financial analysts I can say that I have some idea of where Flash is going and what to expect from the next Creative Suite. But the only information on Acrobat 8.0 is that the upgrades will be a boost to income.

Just had a look at Google blogsearch and this seems to still be the main aspect.
According to Sundar Mudaliyar for PDF Converting, "Cowen and Company said investors worried over Adobe's disappointing guidance for the fourth quarter should take comfort in the launch of Adobe's new Acrobat 8.0 product, set for launch in November.

Analyst Walter Pritchard said the launch of Acrobat 8.0 in the fall could boost revenue by 29% sequentially."

The question is though "what are the features that will encourage the upgrade?", at least that seems a reasonable question at some point.

Sundar Mudaliyar has only limited information- "Acrobat 8.0 will offer users enhanced interactivity features to counter Microsoft's Vista operating system, which is slated for launch in early 2007 and could include PDF conversion tools."

OK, "enhanced interactivity", what can this mean? There is some information coming out from the Flash end of Adobe around 'Apollo' which seems to be a way to work offline with a web environment. Currently I find that Acrobat can capture web pages with Flash but the result can disappear when you save it. Maybe a future PDF will work better as a Flash container. Is that it?

Acrobat is now part of a 'knowledge worker' business unit that also works with Breeze. I find Breeze ok except that I miss having a record later as you do with a PDF set of slides. Maybe Acrobat 8 will include a Breeze plugin.

Whatever the guessing might be about Flash, has PDF development come to an end? This could be the real worry around the Microsoft issues. Creating PDF for static office documents and litho pages is pretty well sorted out and may not remain the sort of function that can be charged at a premium.

So information on what Acrobat 8 actually offers would be interesting.

Jeff Jarvis is well in touch with the UK at this time. He has a lot on the BBC and repeats some views on the Guardian. I have added a comment there.

Briefly, I find I am reaching a limit on accepting the way the Guardian is reporting the shift to online and participatory. Their own moves are ok but they seem to knock anything else. After a while it stops making much sense.

The Guardian and Observer are still confusing when it comes to blogs and the web. They seem to be moving that way but still raise questions about anything on the scene other than themselves.

Today Peter Preston suggests we should 'beware false prophets of the internet age', a reference to Sir Martin Sorrell. Preston shows how the structures of advertising agencies are challenged by the web just as much as print media. "We're all in this together." What is supposed to follow from this? The facts of the trends remain the same. Group M forecast that internet advertisement spend will overtake national press spend by the end of 2006.

The Group M figures are just about the UK. Preston also mentions Omynews with 21,000 'citizen reporters', quote marks as appearing in the Observer. First, a few correction on detail. There is an 'h' in OhmyNews. The founder is Oh Yeon-ho. There are currently about 41,000 citizen reporters for the Korean site and approaching 1000 for the English language site.

More disturbing is the continued use of quote marks around the term "citizen journalism". Why is it that professional print journalists have difficulty in using these words directly with the same meaning as on the OhmyNews site and other places? At least Emily Bell had been direct enough to state that she thinks the term is "horrible" but she has yet to explain why. Is it something about the UK, where we are all supposed to be subjects?

Is it because citizen journalism is seen as too close to blogging? The 'Comment is Free' approach seems to me to combine an attempt to take on the format of a blog while continuing to criticise most of the blogs that previously existed. Preston recently wrote that "Most Guardian journalists....are still in the throes of blogging adjustment. Don't pronounce from on high, or polish too hard. Get down there on the ground in the democracy pit, rubbing shoulders with the southern California wing of Blogosphere Inc. Be one of the boys, like one of your readers. Cultivate a folksy, conversational voice." This was in a comment claiming that search engines now determined a style of writing that can be easily understood and has destroyed the fine traditions of puns in headlines.

As one of many reasons for print journalists not to be too alarmed, Preston points out that "what works in Korea may not work anywhere else". There is no reporting on the English language version of OhmyNews though the number of citizen reporters is up from 300 at the time of the first conference last year. Next month the conference will include information on the new Japanese site. Maybe Preston will come back to this later.

To my mind the most significant recent news is not even mentioned, unless it was included last week and I missed it. The Guardian will offer a free PDF version of online news for readers to print out and carry about. It is assumed that such free offers will help the future audience for web sites. Maybe the Times has a similar idea in publishing print in the USA, where the growth is seen for London online titles.

Round about now, the net is closing in. The web is the main news medium. Print is peripheral. It is all over for the Sunday newspapers.

And finally, Preston takes a very cheap shot at John Simpson just because Simpson links UK tabloids with "false stories" and "interferance in people's private lives". Researching Simpson's autobiography Preston finds dialogue between Simpson's parents from the time that Simpson was little more than a year old. Preston raises the question of how there can have been a shorthand note.

In the comment about search engines, Preston has a few positive things to say about blogging as the scene is not threatening to some traditions of journalism. "I started in journalism because of Thomas Nash and the pamphleteers of London's coffee houses more than 400 years back - because, with no press, let alone a Commentisfree one, society functioned by superlative samizdat and the semi-private phrasemaker was king."

Was he there at the time? Can he show us the notebook?

Lawrence Wallis writes in Printweek that memory is a variable so far as relying on it is concerned. Looking through the Printweek list of 100 movers and shakers I was surprised not to find Martin Bailey, even on the list of those who had slipped away. Then I searched this blog to find he was missing last year. What can this mean? Has JDF become so well established there is no influence to be recognised in going on about it? Maybe Global Graphics is now concentrating on work for Microsoft so are not seen as part of the print industry. This fate has overtaken anyone from Adobe. They go on so much about mobile video that nobody notices anything to do with Postscript.

I may be a bit unfair about the Guardian but then again I genuinely find it hard to understand what they are going on about. I still think there are some muddled messages somewhere.

Today the Reader's Editor, that is the representative for people like you and me, has been lucky enough to get a direct quote from the actual editor on the occasion of the decision not to hold back news from the web just because there is still a print deadline to come.

"I love the paper. I continue to believe in it."

Yeah, right. This is like Jeff Jarvis writing "I have nothing against books".

Such statements are a starting point for something else.

Meanwhile just to show how contrary people can be I am somewaht miffed at a book of coupons sent to me by a kind friend who visited London. The coupons entitle me to reductions on the Guardian and Observer during the world cup. I don't get out much but I think this offer has not turned up in Exeter. In today's media section there is a report that the Manchester Evening News is charged for in the suburbs but now given away in the centre where a new readership is assumed to exist. Maybe the Guardian coupons are intended for people in the south east, assumed to be young and impressionable while the paper version is subsidised by payments from people in the south west and other regions, assumed to be old and slow to change their ways. Anyway, the free web site anywhere is still welcome.

The coupons are accepted in Exeter, by the way.

A big welcome for Roy Greenslade as a blogger. Today in the print version of the Guardian he shows much understanding for the blogosphere, as the Guardian comment machine describes it. "Professional journalists" ( his quote marks ) must "step down from the pulpit and move among the congrgation"...."we have to admit to ourselves that we don't know everything"..more like this, it feels wrong to copy too much out of a print medium. Links from 'Comment is Free' so you can add to it as well.

Unfortunately I find the blog is made up of too many short items. I was hoping for something like the analysis Roy Greenslade used to do of circulation figures for newspapers. The ABC numbers could be compared over the years and made some sense of where each newspaper was going. One problem with this was that as the web became more significant the numbers for print only made less and less sense. The FT for example is fairly close to having more paid subscription online than print sales in the UK. What this means for the finances of the FT is a mystery, as is the financial situation of any of the news websites linked to print operations. There are some new terms, 'news organisation' used by Jeff Jarvis about newspapers with websites, 'media organisation' used by Emily Bell about newspapers with podcasts. But there is no published business model. If there is a business plan then very few people know anything about it. At least that is as far as I know.

But presumably Roy Greenslade is in a position to know a lot more along these sort of lines. If he is not allowed to state all he knows about the Guardian numbers, at least he could make a guess about the FT and then maybe the FT would estimate something on the Guardian. It needs someone like Roy Greenslade to make a start on this. At the 'We Media' event it was suggested that the transition for news organisations could be difficult for existing media and that some would not make it. So how is this to be measured? What progress is being made?

Roy Greenslade links to a report by Julia Day of a speech by Alan Rusbridger that as reported appears to ignore some aspects of citizen journalism. I am afraid I have to agree with the suggestion that "some people may detect an inconsistency" with other speeches expressing enthusiasm for new media. Actually I think the editorial policy of the Guardian is as hard to assess as the business model. There seems to be one version leaked through Jeff Jarvis to a web audience and then another version as in this recent speech presumably meant for a print audience in Oxford. A point of view about citizen journalism comes over either through ambivalent reporting or attempts to incorporate related techniques into the web site. This year "citizen journalism" has been a hype bubble about to burst, as rarely seen as the beast of Bodmin Moor, or else a horrible term in need of a replacement.

To be fair to Roy Greenslade he realises what the issues are around citizen journalism. In the UK the awards approach may turn out not to add very much except for another night out for "professional journalists".

Meanwhile in South Korea, OhmyNews are organising a conference on 'best practices in citizen journalism'. This will be based on a wide range of contributions and has already started with online text and links.

As reported, the latest view from Alan Rusbridger has no mention for the citizen journalism approach of having professional editors supporting a large number of reporters who may also be bloggers or have a similar method of working. He describes blogging as "wonderfully enabling, intoxicatingly democratic, exhilaratingly anarchic" but also states that "no internet start-up on earth would even consider matching the investment in people made by newspapers".

Sometimes a different picture appears through the news pages. On May 31st the Media Business section (not the Monday supplement) reported that OhmyNews would exchange material with the International Herald Tribune and had plans for the launch of a Japanese site. With the English language site, one target is to have 100,000 citizen reporters by 2010. The same page also reported that in the UK, net advertising will soon ovetake national newspapers by cash valuation. A related editorial discussed the future of a medium for news other than paper in twenty or thirty years time. This avoids describing what the Guardian thinks is happening at the moment or any detailed planning about the next eighteen months.

Another example of confused or possibly tightly managed messaging is the promotion of the digital editions. These are PDF or online versions of the complete content including photography and illustration. They are almost never mentioned in the print editions. the intent seems to be to keep them a secret from the UK audience who may continue to buy the print version, while promoting them online to the mostly global audience who find the print version hard to locate. In the Rusbridger worldview as leaked to Buzzmachine, the idea of subscription for web content is now rejected, at least he sees it as a mistake for the New York Times. Maybe this is why the digital editions are more or less a secret. No information is available on any numbers, although ABC have been ready to publish this for a while.

In the absence of a consistent and coherent presentation on what the Guardian is actually trying to do, the blog of Roy Greenslade is one of the best sources of random clues available. His decision to join in with the blogging approach is evidence that something is happening even if the sort of precision implied in analysing a 3% change in circulation figures is not yet available to describe it.

A bit of searching through Google blogsearch has found a couple of posts that confirm there is more going on around Adobe and Microsoft than just a spat about the 'save to PDF' button.

This one leads to this one.

Based in the UK I have even less idea of what is going on than most people writing a blog so I am even more convinced to concentrate on retro functions. Outside of California there is still a lot of interest in hard copy so it could be worth some concentration for at least six months.

Apparently Adobe have caused Microsoft to remove easy access to capability for PDF and XPS from the new version of Office intended to work with Windows Vista. At least the capability will be harder to find. Details through PlanetPDF and PDFZone.

My take is that this is just the start of a transition around Vista to a new level of graphics. This has started with Flash but will go much wider. Why Microsoft is putting out the business version first is a bit of a mystery. History shows that it is people at home who will invest in the new kit to show off what new software can do. The corporate sites will not see much benefit in graphics and will wait for a later version anyway.

Details on Acrobat 8 are very scarce but there is some information in the Flash community about Apollo, apparently some way to work with Flash sites offline. This could be a better way of embedding Flash in PDF. It will already be obvious that I know no detail on what I am speculating about. Which is why my general conclusion is to wait till sometime next year to form any definite view on what will be in Vista, Office or Acrobat 8 or whatever it may be called, maybe something like new and improved Flash container.

Shorthand for this new phase could be 'PDF 2.0'. Again it is obvious speculation to suggest there will be a new number for PDF anytime soon. Still, the phase of transition from Postscript as page description seems to be coming to an end. In an article for PlanetPDF, Karl De Andrew writes "Remember, the question hasn't been whether the basic PDF creation is going to end being free -- the question has always been when." In PDFZone Don Fluckinger recalls that PDF 1.0 came out in the early '90s. This is quite a long time ago in the history of file formats that a company can treat as a franchise.

My impression at the recent Adobe Live in the UK was that PDF for print production or office documents was not a priority. Rich features as in Flash were more prominent. Presumably there will be more possibilites in Adobe products that go beyond what is possible with Microsoft products in Vista.

However my interest is still with PDF 1 point something, in particular the standards for pre-press and archiving. XML is an alternative for archiving as is the Open Document Format available in Open Office for example. Open Office is looking really attractive if it turns out that 'Save as PDF' will not appear in Microsoft products unless another payment is made to Adobe. The 'save as PDF' in Open Office works really well and seems a bit quicker than using Adobe plug-ins to Office. Maybe it helps that the code is written by the same organisation.

Scribus is also looking good. As DTP it offers more design features and saves to pre-press ready PDF. It may lack some of the recent features of InDesign and Quark but my guess is that it offers most of what most people actually use. There is technical support now available. Scribus is sponsored by a German Linux magazine that also supports some space at Cebit so there could be more information on Scribus around next Spring, possibly in time for a stable version of Vista. Many people will look at the features available through Open Source and find them fit for some purposes.

XML has some relation to XPS, the XML paper system developed for Microsoft by Global Graphics. There is discussion about whether Microsoft will actually offer an open standard consistent with XML. It is too early to know how this will work out. Most people need a format that stores documents and a format they can get printed. As open as possible. The choice will be towards anything that helps this and away from any blocks.

Global Graphics have supported JDF as an open standard as well as working with PDF. It is possible to imagine they will support XPS as described. If this turns out to be difficult other ways of printing from XML will be developed over time.

To sum up, my impression is that the Adobe / Microsoft discussion is mostly about products that do not exist at this time. They will be very exciting, but for most of this year attention would be better placed on technology that has already happened and could become more widely available as it is more easily afforded.

Meanwhile, a thorough search on Google reveals that the only hard information on Acrobat 8 is the pre-press wish list.

I am getting increasingly confused about where Acrobat is thought to be in the Adobe scheme of things.

The UK site has a link to AIIM/On Demand in the USA, much more prominent than on the US site. So where could we find the actual content of the Bruce Chizen keynote? OK I guess the people who attended should get the first chance to hear it, but the info now online is pretty scant.

The Acrobat User Chapter is meeting at AIIM/On Demand. As far as I know there was no promotion for the UK chapter at IPEX and the Adobe Live event seems to aimed at crazed Flash designers who don't like text. I am keeping an open mind so look out for updates next week.

Any clues out there? A link to video archive possibly? My current guess is that FLEX is upposed to be the future and Livecycle is not really promoted in the UK.

Next week is Adobe Live at Olympia. As far as I know there are no plans forany promotion of the new Acrobat User chapter for the UK. my take is that Adobe now have a very segmented view of the Acrobat market. There are knowledge workers. There are creative professionals. Then there are whoever the people are who might buy Livecycle but they are so rarified few people know about the meetings they attend. IPEX was great as a link to classic pre-press but this may be unusual. I have done a search on Adobe blogs for 'JDF' and come up with nothing. See screenshot at WWWatford. My point is that I don't think the main Adobe discussion has much connection with hard copy at this time. So that segment is assumed to be content with Postscript and PDF/X anyway. this is probably true. I have started to think about this as classic_Adobe and Flash_Adobe. Now, don't get me wrong. I like Flash_Adobe on occasions or at least what the design is capable of. Tiny text news items surrounded by animated advertising is not really that engaging however. But my interest is in classic_Adobe and I think that is where most of the Acrobat fans are coming from. Yes, my eyesight is fading so maybe the ratio of advertising to text is ok for some people.

Enough, before I go off topic. More later.

The second report is now at OhmyNews

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=4&no=286471&rel_no=1


I am getting feedback on the first one. I think I have got a few things wrong about Scribus. I tried it out on Windows and I definitely needed Ghostscript for this. But I am told that on Linux it uses purpose built methods to create PDF. There is a Windows pc at Life Bytes waiting to sacrificed in the cause of Linux. Enough hesitation. Meanwhile, suggest you check the Scribus site and then test it.

http://www.scribus.net/

OhmyNews have now edited and published my report on XML and open source from IPEX.

It also appears on Google News.

Very reasonably they did not use my own photo from the Dalim press conference with the actual penguin slide. I have put this on the Watford site. WWWatford.co.uk

Any feedback will be repeated in this blog. Not sure what Gee Ranasinha will make of it. I quoted most of his email and then added some comments. Maybe blog interviews are a way forward over time.

Now back in Exeter sorting stuff out.

I am working on two stories for Ohmynews so there will be links later.

Probably over the weekend.

I am still curious as to how Adobe is structured. There was not much sign of the 'classic publishing' business unit as such. Apparently the new PDF Print Engine is developed in San Jose. Maybe it will be an office product eventually.

Checking out through Google News there is some perceptive reporting coming from India. Like this from The Hindu.

"There is an amber sign along this route: go digital — or die."

That just about sums it up.

The Printweek Panel was mostly about innovation but part of this was an answer to the question 'what is "integrated communications vehicles" all about?'

Nicholas Green from Tangent Communications explained a recently launched service to add email and mobile messaging to direct mail. "Tangent is in the messaging business. Print will continue to be a huge part of that. Just not the only area."

This was in response to a question about "print's illustrious future".

Lawrence Wallis closed the meeting with regret that there was not enough time to discuss the timescale of future changes though he stated that in outline, "we are in a declining market".

Plenty to discuss here. The IPEX Daily records that Haymarket have now undertaken to publish Printing World as a monthly. Barney Cox will be the editor as well as group online editor. There may be some form of discussion board, I guess.