Don Fluckinger

Sources familiar with the upcoming Acrobat 9-likely to be released early this summer-say one new wrinkle involves a forms data-tracking service via an updated Acrobat.com Web site to be unveiled along with the release of the application upgrade. The service resolves, Adobe-style, the age-old question of, “Once you make a PDF form in Acrobat, what […]

PDFs been around for almost a decade and a half. Its a secure environment for electronic documentation. In theory, its harder to update, edit and republish content in a PDF, and thats why its so popular. So simple, and it works great: Take a Word file or PowerPoint preso, convert to PDF, and upload to […]

In a bid to increase its presence in the enterprise, Adobe announced this week two new additions to the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, a Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition environment where companies can manage forms and the business processes surrounding them. The new LiveCycle Production Print ES and LiveCycle Output ES are also Adobes latest attempts […]

Acrobat Standard, Professional and Reader received the Windows Vista treatment this week with a new 8.1 update, Adobe announced June 6. The 8.1 update features new hooks into Office 2007, too. “Customers running Vista have an expectation about how applications will look and behave in the Vista environment,” says Marion Melani, group product marketing manager […]

My Friday started out innocently enough, until my accountant told me that a favorite client for whom I write album and music DVD reviews (under a pseudonym) hadnt paid me since August. But alls well that ends well: PDF saved the day by solving the problem that was holding up my check. Ive done a […]

People with differing definitions of what makes an open standard truly “open” will still be able to argue about PDF until theyre blue in the face, but moves made Jan. 29 by Adobe Systems and the Association for Information and Image Management will make PDF more closely resemble an open standard. With Adobes blessing, the […]

Adobe announced Sept. 18 Acrobat 8, which will ship some time in November. A free trial download will be available here when it ships, so early adopters wanting to test-drive the new version should keep their eye on that page. Industry watchers keeping tabs on the San Jose, Calif., company will note that it took […]

PDF authors go to great lengths to protect their documents. But circumventing PDF security could be as easy as opening the document inside Googles e-mail service. Last month, a blog post written by Andreas Bovens—a Belgian doctoral candidate in Japanese Studies attending school in Tokyo—demonstrated how Gmails PDF-to-HTML filter could circumvent some rights-management features in […]

Why did Microsoft decide to support native PDF output in Office applications in its next version, code-named “12” and due out next year? Some analysts claim its a capitulation to Adobes domination of the electronic document space, while others guess its some kind of referendum on Microsofts own Metro or InfoPath technologies. Turns out the […]

Like the native Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats, PDF is not an open standard. Yet all of these formats are de facto standards in their own fields, be it word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and electronic documentation. Most everyone knows and uses them. But PDF has an added bonus: You dont need the native application […]