Acrobat does backflips
Seybold Seminars San Francisco ‘99
 The Moscone Center in San Francisco served as a spectacular Big Top for Seybold
‘99. The theme of this year’s conference and expo was 21st Century Publishing. And as web
and electronic publishing take over from traditional formats, John Warnock, Ringleader and
CEO of Adobe Systems Inc. is delighted with the growing support for Adobe Acrobat.
Only the day before, at the Adobe Developers’ Conference in San Jose, Claude Ezran,
Product Marketing Director of Paper-to-PDF Solutions at Adobe, revealed that 10 trillion
pages are printed worldwide every year. This includes magazines, books, manuals and this
newspaper. The solution? The Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF), "...paper that’s
better than paper because it’s searchable".
The Adobe Corporate Booth at Seybold provided even more compelling reasons to incorporate
PDF into your company workflow. WebBuy will allow the addition of security features to PDF,
facilitating sale of PDF files with restricted use and preventing unauthorized copying.
Developers’ Side Show
More applications of PDF were on offer at the Adobe Partner Pavilion. Mapsoft Limited
was demonstrating their revolutionary new plugins for Acrobat Content Creators, InForm and
PageForm. These applications allow for the creation of interactive forms within InDesign
and Pagemaker, that contain the types of controls normally only found within PDF online
forms. This means that features like text fields, check boxes, radio buttons and even
JavaScript can be added to a PDF form without even launching Acrobat.
The speaker segment, Seven Minutes with a PDF Developer has become an annual event at
Seybold. This year BCL Computers presented Gohtm.com, a free service which allows for the
instant conversion of your document into html, complete with JPEG images and hyperlinks,
while retaining the look and feel of the original.
 InDesign Takes Centre Stage
For Creative Professionals, in-depth presentations of Photoshop, Illustrator and the much
anticipated, InDesign were running all day at the Adobe Theater. Featuring seamless
integration with Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as the ability to open QuarkXpress and
Pagemaker files, InDesign was presented as an irresistible new alternative for designers and
print publishers. John Warnock was excited by the overwhelming reception InDesign has
received.
Workshops
Those unfamiliar with anything on display, were welcome to take part in one of the Adobe
Hands-On Workshops for some intensive training. An Adobe Authorised Trainer from Sokol
Consulting was there to show participants the ropes, with half hour sessions on Photoshop,
Acrobat and Adobe’s web publishing title, GoLive.
At individual Macintosh G3s with flat-panel displays, first-time web-designers could
create their own webpage and understand the significance of the pixel-level precision
offered by GoLive’s visual interface tools.
On With The Show
As we enter a new millennium, we close the book on paper as we know it. Publishing is
no-longer synonymous with printing and the eBook is just around the corner, or rather over
the page.
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