Adobe’s goal of moving PDF from a publicly documented proprietary format to a true international standard is moving into higher gear. AIIM’s new Portable Document Format (PDF) Reference Committee is holding its first meeting on July 16-17 (yes, in less than 2 weeks time), in Silver Spring, Maryland. The page on AIIM’s website offers contact […]
View PostI want to begin highlighting 3rd party sources of information about PDF technology, and one important place to start is with non-English language sources. Today, I’ll mention two such well-established established sites that provide lots of valuable information in languages other than English. Critically, both sites include forums in which users can ask questions and […]
View PostOrganized by Christopher Smith’s AGI (recently acquired by Aquent), last week’s 2007 Adobe Acrobat PDF Conference in Orlando, Florida was a notable success. The co-location with the CRE8 conference for graphic designers expanded the scope to the benefit of all attendees. The Scene From the opening welcome party complete with Mickey Mouse and open bar, […]
View PostI learn something (in fact, usually two or more somethings) at every single PDF event. Last week’s Adobe Acrobat PDF Conference in Orlando was no exception, and I’m not talking about Al Gore’s magnetic presentation on global climate change. This tip is really worth the mention because it is so simple, yet of real value […]
View PostPDF was originally designed to do one thing: deliver an author’s intent to screen or printer in an efficient, precise and platform-independent manner. This “print paradigm” persists today, and colors the issue of accessible PDF in subtle but pervasive ways. To understand how the print orientation in PDF presents a challenge to accessibility, begin with […]
View PostThe PDF/Universal Accessibility (PDF/UA) Committee met at the AIIM Conference and Expo in Boston this past week. If you are interested, you can read the agenda from the public portion of PDF/UA’s Wiki. We welcomed new members and had a productive day-and-a-half of meetings covering a wide range of issues, from MathML to table structure, […]
View PostI hear some version of the following question over and over: “Which software accurately converts PDF to Word?” Converting PDF to Word (or other word-processing applications, HTML or whatever) is not a simple, push-button affair, as almost everyone who has ever tried it knows (thus the questions). Even so, most people are looking for a […]
View PostI was on vacation when Adobe announced that the latest 1.7 edition of the venerable PDF Reference was to be shepherded towards an ISO Standard via AIIM. I checked Adobe’s own FAQ for the move to ISO — it is certainly forthright. Perhaps like most others in this business, I next thought: “great idea, just […]
View PostIntroduction What are bookmarks? We’re not talking about strips of cardboard or dog-eared pages. When present, PDF bookmarks appear to the left of the page (the F4 key toggles the bookmarks “panel” on and off). In the most common application, bookmarks allow users to instantly skip to other locations in the document. That’s VERY handy, […]
View PostOriginally appeared in: Introduction I was on vacation when Adobe announced that the latest 1.7 edition of the venerable PDF Reference was to be shepherded towards an ISO Standard via AIIM. Now the initial dust cloud is settling, I’ll address this move in two articles. For brevity’s sake, I will provide links for the technical terms […]
View PostUsing PDF for a help system is a great idea – providing you don’t make some basic mistakes, keep true to what PDF is, and don’t force it to be what it isn’t. Some general rules for implementing Help documentation in PDF format might go like this: 1) RESPECT THE PRINTED PAGE, aka, think about […]
View PostPDF and Adobe Acrobat still lead the public sector’s electronic document revolution Documents in the form of laws, memos, reports, publications, contracts, policies, regulations, forms and so on are the infrastructure of government. The process of authoring, editing, reviewing, signing, managing, collecting, disseminating or destroying these documents is itself the work of the government, all […]
View PostFew people pay much attention to help files. Like the proverbial (and now nearly extinct) Printed Software Manual, most users only crack open the Help menu when in extremis. The preferred method is to blunder though dialogs and settings on a hunt for magic buttons. It takes a serious stumbling block to convince today’s user […]
View PostLast week, loud noises began emanating from a variety of online security experts regarding a vulnerability in Adobe’s Reader browser plugin that can allow malicious code to execute on a user’s system via cross-site-scripting (XSS). The headlines were choice: “Adobe bug may be worst flaw of 2007”, and “Adobe Flaw Means Trusted PDFs May Be […]
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