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Pratap Ravindran

Adobe has a fight on its hands - with regard to its portable document format or PDF.

YOU slave away for years and, if you're lucky, you get to set a standard, de facto or de jure, which makes everything worth the while. And then, somebody comes along and blows it away. That's life on the New Frontier... .

Take the case of Adobe System's portable document format (PDF). It may never have been formally designated as an Internet standard - but that's what it really was. The operative word being `was.'

Autodesk, one of the top makers of drafting software for architectural and engineering documents, has now launched a two-fisted campaign to persuade users to share documents by using its Design Web Format (DWF) as against Adobe's PDF. And Macromedia has come into the market with FlashPaper, a component based on its Flash animation format which enables users to incorporate documents in Web pages and print them out.

All this at a point of time when Jakob Nielsen, one of the most well-known and respected Web design writers, has panned PDF as being "unfit for human consumption."

According to Nielsen's posting on Alertbox in July, "users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimised for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation."

"PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: printing documents. Paper is superior to computer screens in many ways, and users often prefer to print documents that are too long to easily read online. For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go."

Nielsen asserts that the usability problems that PDF files cause on Web sites or intranets are "legion."

"Linear exposition. PDF files are typically converted from documents that were intended for print, so the authors wouldn't have followed the guidelines for Web writing. The result? A long text that takes up many screens and is unpleasant and boring to read."

"Jarring user experience. PDF lives in its own environment with different commands and menus. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don't work."

"Crashes and software problems. While not as bad as in the past, you're still more likely to crash users' browsers or computers if you serve them a PDF file rather than an HTML page."

"Breaks flow. You have to wait for the special reader to start before you can see the content. Also, PDF files often take longer time to download because they tend to be stuffed with more fluff than plain Web pages."

"Orphaned location. Because the PDF file is not a Web page, it doesn't show your standard navigation bars. Typically, users can't even find a simple way to return to your site's homepage."

"Content blob. Most PDF files are immense content chunks with no internal navigation. They also lack a decent search, aside from the extremely primitive ability to jump to a text string's next literal match. If the user's question is answered on page 75, there's close to zero probability that he or she will locate it."

"Text fits the printed page, not a computer screen. PDF layouts are often optimised for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user's browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts."

According to Nielsen, users hate PDF. "In several recent usability studies, users complained woefully whenever they encountered PDF files. The following are quotes from investors testing the investor relations area on corporate Web sites:

`It's a pain that I have to download each PDF. ... I find it to be annoying. It's slow to load. It's hard to search within it. I find HTML easier to deal with... This is all PDF instead of a chart. My dream site is to come to a site and get a bar chart for the sales within the last ten years... '

`I hate Adobe Acrobat. If I bring up PDF, I can't take a section and copy it and move it to Word. There could be stuff like graphics I don't want. I prefer documents in HTML format so that it's editable... '

And so on and so forth...

The funny thing is that the California-based Adobe had recently stated that a major boost in its earnings was directly related to its new line of PDF-related products released earlier this year. Be that as it may, analysts are taking the threat to the company seriously. But Chuck Meyers, a technology strategist for Adobe's ePaper division, has been quoted by the media as saying that the virulent criticism of the PDF actually represents an acknowledgement of the company's success in popularising the format.

That may be so - but it hasn't stopped Autodesk, from coming out with an advertising/marketing campaign which highlights the problems involved in exchanging engineering documents using the PDF. There's some irony involved here because Adobe had recently run a campaign stressing compatibility with AutoCAD — Autodesk's main application for architectural drafting — as a selling point for Acrobat Professional, the new high-end version of its PDF authoring tool!

Going by the company's statements, AutoDesk's strategy for promoting DWF has been defined by customer inquiries about the best way to exchange engineering documents. Engineering documents invariably contain extremely dense visual data which PDF is not equipped to handle because of its paper orientation. Autodesk took this problem and ran with it and put together the DWF format. It's been around for seven years now - but it's only recently that the firm decided to inject some aggression into the promotion of the format. Autodesk currently offers a free downloadable application — Autodesk Express Viewer — for viewing and creating basic DWF files through which move it hopes to goose the sales of Volo View, a $49 application with additional annotation and review capabilities, as also future products featuring additional collaboration tools.

As for Macromedia, the San Francisco outfit is also trying to deal with some of the problems of PDF with its new FlashPaper which is available through the company's Contribute application for light-duty Web publishing. FlashPaper can be used by Web publishers to convert any document into a Flash file which can be printed from a browser window without knocking a computer out of kilter. According to the company and Web publishers, FlashPaper documents are handier than HTML documents and faster than those in PDF. But there's a problem: FlashPaper documents can be viewed online - but can't be saved or transmitted through e-mail.

Adobe isn't sitting around crying into its beer. Adobe Systems has opened a new front by announcing the launch of new versions of Photoshop and other publishing and graphics products. The new product combines Photoshop, the InDesign page layout application, and the Illustrator graphics application into the Adobe Creative Suite which features a bunch of integrated tools designed to facilitate movement from one application to another. The most exciting tool is Version Cue, a basic content management tool which has been well received.

Scott Kelby, the President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, has been quoted in sections of the media as saying that Version Cue deals with deftness version control and collaboration problems that have been bugging Adobe customers for quite some time and that it's seamless.

Fillip from Opera

Meanwhile, in a development that should give a major fillip to the company, Opera Software has announced that it has reached a licensing agreement with Adobe Systems to include Opera's rendering engine in future Adobe product releases for the Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Opera's cross-platform, (W3C) standards-compliant rendering engine with built-in Small-Screen Rendering (SSR) technology can save users the hassle of testing their Web pages for different browsers, devices or screen sizes. An Opera press release has quoted George Arriola, senior product manager for Adobe GoLive, as saying: "The discipline of graphic design is evolving, and traditional practitioners are asking for rich typographic capabilities within Web and mobile design. As a result, firms are moving their brand experience to pure CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) designed content. Adobe realises and embraces this crucial design requirement by partnering with and licensing leading technology from Opera Software." The release adds that Opera's rendering engine is based on the same core code as all of Opera's other browser versions, which has been thoroughly tested by millions of users for more than seven years. "Impatient Web developers can already now download the latest version of Opera to test their pages. Ensuring that Web pages will look great independent of the browser or device that is accessing is easy: Simply write standards-compliant code and test in Opera just like Opera users can do with a click in the near future."

Frontier justice is alive and well...

Picture by Sampath Kumar G.P.

eworld@thehindu.co.in

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