Time to say goodbye to Acrobat as the portable document standard

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Time to say goodbye to Acrobat as the portable document standard - Pages is here.

Date Created: 12 Feb, 2005, 09:49 PM

Stay with me on this one because I know that to challenge a monopoly product is not an easy thing to do. But if you are a Mac owner or user, you know - as I do - that we don't need no stinkin' monopolies!

For whatever reasons, Adobe's Acrobat has the market to itself as the sole portable document file format - or pdf.

Some examples of its current use: Last week, I was invited to register for a workshop and emailed an Acrobat file to complete, if I had the Professional version, whence I could email the completed form. If I just had the standard version then the task was to print it out and fax or mail it.

For my Knowledge Management studies last year, I gave up using Microsoft Word and used RedleX's Mellel, which for me is much more Mac-like and didn't get in my way, freeze or crash.

Because I couldn't email lecturers Mellel files, nor did I want to send Rich Text format files, I simply used Mac OS X's built in pdf creator and sent a pdf version by email.

My diagrams and layout were preserved, and I was happy enough with the pdf solution.

Now that Apple's Pages has come along and I've been playing with it for a few weeks now, it seems to me Apple has given us the software equivalent of the Leatherman Wave multipurpose tool.

Word Processor, Page layout application, and...

Well, one of the things that bothered me with my assignments last year was having to hand them in as either paper documents, or Word files. Basically, static pages with little else going for them, apart from perhaps colour illustrations.

I could have sent in a presentation of say, Powerpoint, but that won't do for a 6000-word essay.

No, what I wanted to do was send in an essay in traditional format, but with some pizzazz.

For instance, one essay I wrote for a unit called Technology and Society looked at the history of the personal computer, hacking, and of course Apple. I chose to do an essay on iTunes' Music store and its disruptive impact on the recorded music industry.

So much of what I wanted to write included music tracks, as well as video I had located on the web, including Apple's Knowledge Navigator, from the days when John Sculley ran the show.

Let's come now to Pages. While the Navigator was conceived as an advanced interactive device (and still looks good decades later), Pages is a step forward, going beyond the printed word for communicating ideas.

Look at how Apple has blessed Pages with integration with iLife applications, specifically iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie. It makes navigating to those folders easy, allowing you to drag and drop files into the terrific Apple-supplied templates, or those of your own design.

Naturally, most people will be familiar with incorporating photos into documents. But is it time for a paradigm shift when it comes to communication documents?

Why are we limiting ourselves to printed words and pictures, when the internet is so interactive with movies, Flash illustrations and animations, and sound files?

Pages makes it easy to incorporate these other files. Clearly, Apple has something in mind by allowing Pages to make use of these file types, and not merely because of some technological determinism: we did it because we could.

How could you incorporate these media?

Imagine you are IKEA and incorporate a Pages document on a DVD or CD together with a printable document showing how to assemble a piece of furniture.

Or you are a Travel Agent giving your client more than just a colour brochure showing a destination of interest.

Last week I attended a travel agent's wholesale show where a tourist bureau brought together tour operators to show their wares to about 30 travel agents. We went from table to table watching uninspiring Powerpoint shows of the Broome region of Western Australia.

How much better to use Pages' travel template to provide both text and pictures (which can be printed out), but on a Pages CD or DVD - with an iWork reader, a free standalone app. like Acrobat Reader - the page comes alive with sounds and movies.

You could use any of Pages' other templates to share company, club or family information, with the CEO, Chairman or family members recording a personal message.

Indeed, why not a version of Pages that integrates with the iSight camera to directly import your good self describing the content of a document - no need to edit and compress in iMovie first.

With Quicktime 7 and H.264 codecs on their way in Tiger OS X 10.4, Pages files with multiple embedded movies could be kept quite small. Already, Pages allows you to import .mov and 3GP files and rotate and flip the former (the latter seems to be buggy in this regard).

How possible is it that any "How to" advice, corporate or open source, could use Pages to offer an "all in one document" communication means? I wonder if those contemplating Videocasting (video podcasting) can see where this could go?

Put it this way: Have you ever opened an Acrobat document and just wished it could come alive where an individual in a photo would actually talk to you and describe in their own words the essence of their article you are viewing?

Pages will still allow you to print your document, but on a Mac (or a Windows iWork reader) clicking on a photo file would bring the photo alive. Try doing this in Microsoft Word and see how hard it is.

Somehow, I think Apple has plenty planned for Pages which is showing a great deal of promise. Indeed, if you go to Apple's feedback site for Pages, there is a drop down menu which asks what version of Pages you are writing about. (Mind you, the same page asks what version of OS X you're using, but limits it to 10.3.6 or .7 - not .8, released a few days ago.)

After all, there has been a growing distance between Apple and Adobe, and Mac owners now read and create pdf files without Acrobat at all - using Preview and the Finder to create pdfs. And its far quicker in Preview than using Acrobat, and sure to get faster with Tiger.

Why not go a step further and develop a new portable document file protocol, one for the internet generation used to seeing and hearing multimedia via the web and CD?

If one company can define a new standard, it's Apple who has the runs on the board.

Update: Somehow or other I ended up today surfing over to Edward Tufte's homepage. You will know him as a superior writer about how information is best presented, as well as his criticism of slack Powerpoint presentations (to put it mildly). He has a new book due soon called, Beautiful Evidence, where he discusses how best to present data. Follow the link, and scroll down to the chapter extract he offers. In particular, locate the paragraph on Page 17 of the chapter, entitled, "Production Methods".

Here, Tufte writes:

"A good system for evidence display should be centered on documents (orig. ital.), not on a collection of application programs each devoted to a single mode of information. Rather than wandering around a bureaucracy of operating systems and applications programs, users should work entirely with documents that report evidence. Long ago such was the case: in the original graphical user interface (developed 1970-81 at Xerox) users saw only (orig. ital.) documents - and never saw an operating system or a free-standing application. Text, graphics, tables and mathematical formulas were all edited inside documents (orig. ital.), not inside separate application programs. The unfortunate current-day practice of segregation of informaiton by its mode of production should not become a metaphor for evidence presentations. Why should the intellectual architecture of our reports reflect the chaos of the computer bureaucracy producing the reports?"