09/13/2004 - 09/19/2004

Darin does JDF

Darin Kotalik from Adobe gave a great intro to JDF presentation

Dov Isaacs also put in some good comments about how JDF today is like the "highway system in the 1930's", where the infrastructure is there - but the roads aren't all built yet"

They both mentioned (more than once!) that Adobe is working diligently to enable users to be able to use JDF throughout an Adobe workflow - from authoring, to processing, to print.

Sean and Olaf on Fixing PDFs

Sean Hiss, from Enfocus, started the session with information about why PDFs can sometimes be problematic for use in printing...

• Bad authoring tools
• Bad PDF creation tools
• Less knowledgable users
• In other words - GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out!

Preflight GOOD! The earlier the better...

A bit about PDF vs. PDF/X, and why PDF/X is better for printing...but of course, he also had to get in a thing on PDF/X-Plus. Don't get me started on X-Plus and it's Enfocus-isms!!!

Olaf then got up and talked about a few more technical items including trapping, overprinting, font details (such as CID), etc.

Just what fonts come with Acrobat 6?

The question came up again this morning about what fonts does Acrobat include - so for the official information, I decided to open up the Acrobat Resources folder and check! (oh, and since Dov Isaacs was sitting behind me, I asked him to verify as well ;).

The results are:

• AdobePI (OTF) - used for special symbols in Acrobat Forms
• Courier family (OTF) - A "last resort" font choice
NOTE: the font is actually CourierStd Medium
• Symbol (Type1) - used for non-embedded symbols
• AdobeSansMM & AdobeSerifMM (Type1) - used for font substitution

Also, if you've installed Asian Language support for Acrobat, you'll find additional fonts installed such as AdobeMingStd, AdobeMyungjoStd, AdobeSong, KozGoPro, KozMinPro.

Building Better PDFs

Carl's keynote was about "Building Better PDFs"...

He reviewed a variety of errors and issues that PDFs for online/screen frequently exhibit - and then how to fix them.

• Missing Fonts
• Missing links and/or bookmarks
• Invalid links and/or bookmarks
• Too large!
• Not properly web enabled
• Wrong default settings (zoom, open page, etc.)
• Image-only PDFs

Good stuff that everyone should be aware of and deal with it!

Carl Young gets things going

Carl Young, the man behind this conference, got things going with a bunch of surveys about who the attendees are and I thought I'd write up the notes.

• About 95% were using Acro 6 Pro
• About 4.99% were using Acro 5
• One person was using Acro 4
• and one person was using Acro 3 - who'd have thunk!!!

In terms of OS platform, about 75% were on Windows and 25% on Mac OS X.

Good mix of print vs. web - and a LOT of folks doing both!

People were also using a variety of applications to author their docs - Word, PageMaker, InDesign, etc. However, no one was using Ventura Publisher ;).

PDF Conference/Baltimore

So here I am in Baltimore for a few days attending (and speaking) at the 9th PDF Conference... I'll be writing up notes from some of the sessions that I've attended, in case anyone who wasn't able to attend is curious what's up... Leonard