Blog of the Sage

Adobe eyes the Linux Desktop Market

From CNet...

Adobe Systems, maker of major desktop software products such as Photoshop and Acrobat Reader, has begun a quiet effort to become more involved with desktop Linux.

Adobe has largely been on the sidelines of efforts to boost Linux for desktop computers, the vast majority of which run Microsoft Windows. The software maker is now taking a more active role by joining a prominent Linux consortium, working to improve Linux and planning to lead its own open-source development projects, CNET News.com has learned.

Two job postings reveal some of the company's intentions. Adobe wants to hire a director of Linux market development to "identify and evaluate strategies for Adobe in the Linux and open-source desktop market" and to identify projects that "will help improve Linux as a desktop environment." The employee also will "develop strong business relationships with leading Linux distributors and partners."

The rest of the article is here...

JHOVE - Java-based file validation

JHOVE (pronounced "jove") is a "extensible framework for format validation" written in Java with modules forarbitrary byte streams, ASCII and UTF-8 encoded text, GIF, JPEG, and TIFF images, AIFF and WAVE audio, PDF, and XML; and text and XML output handlers.

As you might imagine, I am quite excited about the PDF module which includes support not only for basic PDF, but also PDF/X and the upcoming PDF/A, but also the JPEG2000 module which should prove helpful with some work we are doing.

Font tools and the new FTMaster

In addition to being a maintainer of the FreeType project, I spend a lot of time working with fonts and text for our PDF and Postscript work. As such, I am always on the lookout for good tools to help debug fonts and font-related issues.

On Unix, I love the open source FontForge program (formerly PfaEdit) - it can open up any font format you can think of, edit them (either manually or programmatically) and then save as the same OR A DIFFERENT format. George Williams does great work - but only for Unix platforms. (OK, I can install X under CygWin, but I've better ways to punish myself ;)

When I'm working on the Mac, I use Font Inspector by Steve Hartwell. Another excellent tool that has saved my butt on multiple occassions. Steve keeps promising me a Windows versions - but nothing yet :(

FINALLY, someone has come out with a tool for Windows that does everything I need - AND THEN SOME - including reading font data directly from PDF files!!! Altsoft's new FTMaster is just what this "doctor" ordered and worth every penny of the $99(US). Of course, that's an introductory price - so get in there before they raise it.

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

Postscript generation on Mac OS X

I keep meaning to write up some comments on this subject, and since it came up at work today - now is a good time!

First, let's look back at Mac OS 9 and how printing took place.

In Mac OS 9, applications printed using one of three methods..

• QuickDraw - the native drawing model of Mac OS 1->9
• QuickDraw + PSComments - native drawing plus some Postscript fragments when necessary
• "pass through" Postscript - send PS directly to the printer

When sending QuickDraw(QD) either by itself or with PSComments, the printer driver was responsible for converting the QD instructions into Postscript and then sending the PS unto the printer. This is how most applications worked. However, professional graphic tools (eg. Adobe apps, Quark, Macromedia apps) would take the last route and generate their own PS and send that or if dealing with a non-Postscript printer would send a big raster image.

Mac OS X no longer uses QuickDraw for imaging, instead moving to a PDF & PS-compatible drawing model called Quartz. Quartz's image model and it's ability to read & write PDF documents permeates the entire OS - including the printing system. I have a whole presentation about this - if you wish to read more. One feature of note, however, is that the OS includes the ability to create Postscript from PDF (and as of 10.3/Jaguar, the ability to create PDF from Postscript)

OK - back to printing...

Instead of the three modes of Mac OS 9, Mac OS X offers four modes...

• QuickDraw compatibility - a path for older/dumber apps to print
• Quartz - the native drawing model of Mac OS X
• "pass through" Postscript - send PS directly to the printer
• "pass through" PDF - send either PDF or PS directly to the printer (new in 10.3)

A handful of applications that haven't been fully Carbonized may still use Quickdraw to render on the screen and/or to the printer. In those cases, such applications don't get any of the benefits of Mac OS X including the integrated PDF support. They will be able to print, as the OS will convert QuickDraw to PDF on the fly during printing - BUT any attempt to use PSComments will fail.

The majority of applications - be they Carbon or Cocoa-based - will use Quartz to print. They already use it to render and now they send it to the printer. This will create a PDF file automatically into the printer's spooler, since PDF is the native spool format for Mac OS X. These PDFs are high quality, though sometimes larger than necessary - but take advantage of advanced PDF features such as ICC profile-based colors, subset fonts and Unicode support.

The one caveat to clean and simple PDF/PS generation with Mac OS X is an application, such as Microsoft Word, that supports the inclusion of EPS graphics. Versions of Mac OS X prior to 10.3/Jaguar did a pretty poor job of passing this information to the printer - 10.3 is just fine, however

Even so, professional printing apps can continue to send PS directly to the printer - but in the event that the user doesn't have a PS printer, the app no longer has to rasterize into a big image, the OS can now convert the PS to PDF and handle it itself! Newer applications, such as Acrobat 6.0.1 and later, running on 10.3/Jaguar can even send PDF documents directly to the printing system avoiding all the overhead.

So a Postscript printer will get Postscript created either by the application directly or by the OS-provided conversion of PDF to Postscript. Unfortunately, this isn't the world's best Postscript and has a number of issues, especially with proper handling of fonts and text that may later be reused for other purposes. (For printing it is just fine, but PS reuse is a known issue.)

Bottom Line - if you are working with Mac OS X and Postscript, make sure you are using Mac OS 10.3 or later with the latest versions of your authoring/production applications!

Acrobat Development Workshops

Adobe and PDF Sages will be offering a FREE set of workshops as part of the upcoming PDF Conference in Baltimore during September.

I'll be delivering the first workshop that morning - "Developing with Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader". It's a great half-day introduction to all aspects of using Adobe's PDF tools to deliver PDF solutions to your customers. We'll cover plug-ins, Visual Basic, JavaScript, XML and more!

The afternoon will feature Lori Defurio, Adobe's Developer Evangelist, speaking about their new LiveCycle architecture for server-based integration of PDF, XML and Java. It's VERY cool stuff and worth checking out - plus Lori gives good demo!

You don't need to attend the conference to attend our workshops, but I recommend the conference also - some of the smartest people in the PDF world will be there and happy to impart their knowlege!

XFDF support for iText

Another open source project that I contribute too is iText - a GREAT Java-based PDF generation library. It also has some basic manipulation facilities, such as stamping, form filling, etc.

Although iText already had support for the Forms Data Format (FDF), it didn't support the new XML-based XFDF. Due to a request from a client, I've written the XFDF support for iText and submitted it to Paulo and Bruno for inclusion in the next update.

If anyone needs it sooner, drop me a line!

FoxIt PDF Editor and the "Graphic Keyboard"

Back in May, I discovered a new PDF tool called Foxit PDF Editor from a new entry into the PDF market, Foxit Software.

I was quite impressed with what they had done to build a PDF viewer with basic editing functionality integrated - sort of like Adobe Reader + Enfocus PitStop in a single product! In order to support the company, and given the LOW price of $79, I bought a copy!

I just discovered today, however, that they have a 1.1 update - but as registered user, I am VERY disappointed that they never notified me of this upgrade.

In addition to some performanceand rendering improvements, which are always welcome - the 1.1 version has one KILLER feature that I've not been able to find elsewhere and will help my PDF development & debugging immensely.

It's called the "Graphic Keyboard" and is available when you are editing text. What it does is bring up something equivalent to Windows CharMap...BUT for only those glyphs in the font! In other words, you can actually see what glyphs are available in a subset font!!!

I can't believe no one else thought of this before now - but I know I'll be getting some use out of it

Why "refrying" PDF->PS->PDF is bad!

I got into a discussion/argument today on the PlanetPDF Forums about the process of conversion of PDF->PS->PDF to help "clean up" PDF files. This process, called refrying is one that used to be quite popular, but since Acrobat 5.0 has been frowned upon by Adobe and others.

The reason for this process being avoided is due to the wide variety of PDF features that can NOT be represented in Postscript.

Here are a list of things that you might use in the content of a PDF that don't translate well to PostScript

• Transparency
• ICC-based colors
• 16bit color
• JBIG2 compression
• JPEG2000 compression
• Layers (Optional Content Groups)

Also consider that any additional information added to PDFs during a PDF-based workflow (such as from Creo or Agfa) will be removed during the PDF->PS downgrading...

Of course, there is also the myriad of non-content elements that can be found in a PDF that don't translate to Postscript/print, such as

• Hyperlinks
• Annotations, Commenting and Markup
• Forms
• Multimedia (movies, sounds, etc.)
• Bookmarks
• Metadata
• and more....

So in conclusion...

JUST SAY NO TO REFRYING

Security company that just doesn't get it

Essential Security Software is trying to sell their product to folks producing PDF files and looking for low-cost DRM options.

However, I see a WHOLE BUNCH of flaws with this including

1. Only available for Windows - so all your Mac, Linux, etc. users are out of luck :(
2. 2) Requires "key exchange" with each user, so no immediate security to an "unknown".
3. 3) Uses their own viewer which may limit your ability to properly format and structure your content
4. 4) The company offers NO physical address for their company NOR a phone number. What kind of support do you expect to get from a company like that?

Susan McGinty in their Business Development group responded to me as follows

1. 1) Sorry, this is true. Use with Linux may be possible in a future version.
2. 2) True, but this is the intended use for our product - secure exchange of information between known users. You need to get a passport from your intended recipient, which they can generate using the free trial version of our software. Even if they decide not to buy the software, their passport and the Reader will remain active so that you can still send them encrypted documents.
3. 3) The viewer is mainly window area - I think it actually takes up less screen real estate than the Acrobat Reader. Please try it with a friend (have them send you something with View Only rights) and see if it meets your needs. Please provide us with feedback if it doesn't because we are always trying to improve the product.
4. 4) When we opened our new Corporate HQ office the old address was deleted from our site but the new address was not added. A bad oversight but this has been corrected. Our address is 2828 North Harwood, Suite 1717, Dallas, Texas 75201. Customer Service may be reached toll-free at 1-888-454-2632. Feedback and questions are also welcome through our website, http:/www.essentialsecurity.com.