As I said in my recent review, the launch of Acrobat 9 is the most important release in years. Naturally most of the attention has been on the incorporation of the Flash player into the Adobe Reader with all that this means in terms of media handling and interactivity.
However it’s possible that the associated launch of Acrobat.com will eventually prove even more significant.
Acrobat.com is great for users of Adobe’s Acrobat software – Standard, Pro and Pro Extended – as it provides 5GB of free storage to which you can post PDFs for centralized commenting and form filling rather than going through the traditional hassle of an email round robin.
That’s useful enough but it’s only the beginning. I assumed that Acrobat.com would act simply as online storage for PDFs that would be downloaded for viewing in the Acrobat apps or free Adobe Reader - but that’s only the case if you need those advanced capabilities such as commenting and form filling or want an offline copy.
If all you want to do is share your PDFs with others then Acrobat.com does it itself online! Click through to this sample file and you’ll see what I mean.
When I first saw this I wasn’t sure what I was seeing – was it a JPEG version of my uploaded PDF? And, if so, why was it fully scalable and so fast? Eventually it dawned on me – Acrobat.com is automatically converting all uploaded PDFs to Flash and displaying them online!
Previously online viewing of PDFs was semi-detached from the web and required a fast desktop system capable of running Adobe Reader - and the quicker the better for rendering performance. Now, thanks to Acrobat.com, PDFs can be made quickly viewable directly in the browser by any system capable of running the Flash player (think next-generation handheld).
In other words Acrobat.com brings yesterday’s slow, semi-detached, page-based, offline, email-oriented PDFs into today’s fast-paced, streamlined, screen-based, online, web-centred world – by turning them into Flash!
And you don’t even have to use Adobe’s Acrobat software to take advantage of Acrobat.com’s Flash-based online sharing. The 5GB of free space is open to everyone. I strongly recommend checking it out.
Tags: acrobat, acrobat.com, adobe, digital design, Flash, pdf
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July 7th, 2008 at 5:37 am
Oh dear
Is there a way of disabling the Flash in PDF, like there is in browsers like Firefox (NoScript / FlashBlock)?
July 7th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Had a quick look and yes it looks like you can change the Multimedia Trust setting in Preferences in the Pro Extended version at least.
More generally I take your point about Flash and its reputation for distracting from the content it is meant to serve but would argue that that’s blaming the platform rather than the designers. Moreover as a platform Flash has moved on a long way since its vector animation roots and these days is all about delivering content whether vectors, bitmaps, audio, video or text.
Within the offline PDF context I think any universal document format these days really needs to be able to reliably cover audio, video and end user interaction. Within the online context of Acrobat.com there wouldn’t be any content without Flash - it’s delivering it all.
In fact to take advantage of free online services such as Acrobat.com, Buzzword, ConnectNow and Photoshop Express you might well decide to turn FlashBlock off rather than Flash.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
The problem I see most often is dull boring PDF users, being force-fed network wide updates to platforms they have been strenuously avoiding for as long as possible. Does this new release drag tons of bloat with it just to read a plain-text PDF? The last thing my large-scale corporate PDF users want is merry dancing lines of OCR’ed invoices on their intranet…
July 10th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Did we ever want a technology that displays paper-sized images that no one ever prints? My PCs have different sizes of screen. On the smaller ones I don’t want to be clawing the paper image dragging it around so I can read it. I want it to flow to the available window width. Is that a lot to ask? Where on earth do they think they are going with this?
I get the digital edition of New Scientist magazine which uses a similar approach with another proprietary viewer. Short of a display with unimaginable resolution I cannot get a whole page height on the screen and still be able to read it. Likewise, is this a solution to anything?
We need to get away from paper sizes and accept that people actually use computers these days.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Regarding Steve’s point about bloat: I did ask about the player size at the press briefing and was told that the Flash player was less than 2MB so it didn’t make too much difference. Turns out that was a bit disingenuous as it looks like Adobe is using it as a way to spread AIR which is nearer 12MB so Reader 9 is a hefty 33.5MB (and make sure you uncheck the optional 19MB of junk). For enterprise use the sweetener should be the free small scale video conferencing and screen sharing via Acrobat.com though I’m sure you’ll have thoughts on that too.
Regarding Paul’s points: yes we definitely do want an electronic version of print for lots of reasons - simple universal design rich output from any application, archiving, collaboraton, secure signing and so on. But I absolutely take your point about onscreen viewing of PDFs being less than optimal at the best of times and pretty much unworkable on mobiles. The problem is that, yes, a reflowable design rich layout adaptive to screen size is a lot to ask for. Drop the design-rich and you have html which is obviously great for lots of things but no-one would choose to read the New Scientist for pleasure like that (I’m a subscriber too and you get online access to the entire archive but it’s just not the same thing). The good news is that everyone is aware of the problem and working on adaptive layout– ie shrink the window size and the number of columns and size of images and point size etc changes. Adobe Labs showed some new adaptive layout technology for Flash a while back but the best current option comes from Microsoft but is limited to WPF machines. If they can do something similar via the cross-platform Silverlight then things should get very interesting.
More generally: Steve’s enterprise-level just leave it as simple fixed text and Paul’s cutting-edge adaptive layout requirements shows what a challenge Adobe faces. As I said in the piece I think Acrobat.com’s PDF to Flash conversion is a useful bridge. Maybe if at some point the Flash version can automatically and intelligently adapt layouts to screen size too (not simple) then everyone will be happy.
July 27th, 2008 at 12:41 am
Thanks Tom for a courteous and well thought out response.
I agree that automatic adaptation to arbitrary display sizes is a difficult goal. However we are so used to paper that we forget its own limitations. The reader has no control over the fonts, and authors go irritatingly non-linear in their layouts by placing digressive boxes here and there.
I never know whether to break off the main flow to read those boxes, or go back to read them later. As for fonts, I have a temporary eye problem which I can get round on web pages by changing the text size. Not so easy in a PDF layout short of zooming the whole thing, which is not what I want.
So paper layouts have their problems, it’s just we are so used to them that we never question them.
I wonder if on paper and in digital form we are trying too hard. We forget that users should be able to exert some influence of their own. They should be able to turn images and waffly formats on and off. They should have control over fonts and colours if they wish — to get round problems such as coloured backgrounds that make it a strain to read text — or simply because (as in my case) I find fiddly serif fonts such as Times New Roman distasteful.
Of course that amount of user freedom is something that may make authors recoil in horror, but that attitude goes against the empowering of individuals that the internet can provide. Inevitably it is going to come with web 2.0, where text will eventually be published in accessible hierarchical structure whose components can be analysed programmatically, leading to the possibility of user-chosen user-configurable renderers, of which perhaps PDF may be one.