Have Adobe left PDF behind in a rush to Flash?

Acrobat 8 will feature a major push for Flash video as meeting space. Breeze is now Acrobat Connect. The promotion is aimed at knowledge workers in general, much wider than the sages of pre-press. The idea seems to be that video, email chat, and voice over internet are more exciting than marking up documents. Acrobat is no longer based on PDF.

A possible explanation is concern that simple PDf creation is increasingly available from other sources. Microsoft will now offer PDF creation as a download for Vista so this may slow things down for a while. Open Office works ok for exporting PDF and Writely from Google shows no sign of charging for online PDf as was once a possibility.

As far as I can make out, Adobe will do very little to promote the print aspects of Acrobat 8. The JDF creation is almost unknown and may remain so. Companies such as Quark and Global Graphics have more of a focus on hard copy. Next week Adobe will be in tents on Regents Park but not at Digital Print World.

Please comment on this post as things occur. There will be more later.

Print industry needs JDF to keep up with the Web

Thinking about next week at Digital Print World I think the digital aspects are interesting for the whole print industry, especially the litho part. Sometimes the discussion is about the fairly slow way in which digital print will take a larger share of the whole hard copy market. The growth of digital media is much faster. YouTube may be overvalued but the web is now an entertainment vehicle with enough bandwidth for video. Print is only one possible choice so needs to appear as flexible and immediate as anything online. It turns out that AJAX stands for something including XML so however much this is actually understood by anybody, JDF could work as part of this.

Update on Lawrence Wallis: there is no blog

Information has come to hand that there is no actual blog by Lawrence Wallis. The coloumns in Printweek were just about blogs in general. Still just the idea that such a thing is possible is a sign of the times.

I will keep reading the hard copy and add a comment here if there is more on blogs.