Don Fluckinger

The free Adobe Reader is everywhere! PDFs are easy to make! Everyones doing it! Because of that, PDFs are getting a bad rep in certain tech circles. The argument goes something like this: Writing in to a Ziff Davis Media sister site, Microsoft Watch, a reader proclaimed PDFs a “plague on the Internet.” His main […]

Got RAID? If youre running Acrobat 7 with an array, and youre having activation issues, youre not alone. The blogospheres jumping, and an Acrobat customer e-mailed us about the problem, in which Adobes activation scheme mistook his Level 1 RAID system—a scheme in which a system stores data on multiple hard drives simultaneously for backup […]

Professionals working in engineering and CAD across industries—from architecture and construction to manufacturing—could have an international PDF standard in the next couple of years, if a committee developing the PDF/E standard can iron out issues such as implementing 3D, digital signatures and rights management. This week represents a milestone for PDF/E, as the U.S. wing […]

The Google Desktop utility went live Monday, after about a six-month beta cycle. The 1.0 release supports PDF search, for the first time. Moreover, ScanSoft has brought to market a beta plug-in called OmniPage Search Indexer that not only supports PDFs containing text, but also can OCR and index image-based PDFs with scanned text and […]

In talking to the enterprise world, Adobe likes to use the “secure container” metaphor for PDF. This idea, that the data contained in a password-protected PDF is safe and secure, isnt complicated, but by the time you toss in the concepts of document workflow, server-side encryption and “policies” served, it is way over the head […]

The history of Acrobat Elements in brief: The PDF world went collectively slack-jawed when it found out that Adobe had been test-marketing something referred to as “Acrobat Lite” in Europe during the year preceding Acrobat 6s release. When Adobe released that test product as Acrobat Elements 6, though, many potential users couldnt get the software, […]

Not only did Acrobat 7 get a makeover late last year, but so did the 1.6 PDF spec and many of the LiveCycle PDF server products. And, dont forget, many third-party software developers of plug-ins and stand-alone utilities and applications have either announced updates based on the new Adobe software or will soon. So lots […]

Adobe isnt the only game in town when it comes to PDF forms: ActivePDF, Amgraf, Cardiff and ScanSoft also offer various tools to convert paper processes to PDF. But one interesting new wrinkle that likely will generate interest in Acrobat 7 involves dynamic forms, which are smart forms capable of updating themselves based on user […]

Right now, desktop searching is one of those emerging technologies that in theory—looking through both your hard drive and the Web at the same time for relevant hits—sounds life-changing but in practice still seems like the MP3 player before the iPod came out: Yeah, they work, but no one does it. Microsoft and Apple are […]

Any Internet user who has a conscience—or at least wants a message to be heard—knows that the less bandwidth one uses, the more people will pay attention. Or look at a page. Or download a file. An entire culture has sprung up around making PDFs smaller, from features Adobe has built into Acrobat to third-party […]