Look, No Paper, It's The Acrobat
The Age
Wednesday June 2, 1993
IT QUICKLY becomes apparent, when you visit the computer industry's biggest trade show, Comdex/Windows World in Atlanta, Georgia, that there are, as Atlanta people are wont to say, a ``vaast dah-versity" of computers and the things that make them work.
One becomes acutely aware of this the moment one enters the suite of rooms set aside at this event for press releases. Every day, a multitude of folders, paper, photographs and color slides are wheeled into this space to inform those of us who report the proceedings of these events to a breathlessly expectant public, of the release or enhancement of a mind-numbing range of products. Every day they are replaced by a new set, arrayed in alphabetical order. They accumulate such a formidable mass that some journalists turned up at Comdex with luggage trolleys.
This flood of paper is not exclusively directed at the press. Many of the 85,000 people who visited this year's show collected such a haul of samples and promotional material that trolleys became endemic, and at least one of the two exhibition stalls that sold nothing but luggage trolleys sold out.
When you realise that this is Spring Comdex, and that it is only a fraction of the size of Fall Comdex, held in Las Vegas (a venue that has none of the charm of Atlanta, a largely invisible city that disappears into a hardwood forest and which brought the world such delights as Coca-Cola and Ray Charles, and the heroic Martin Luther King) to say nothing of the other shows around the world devoted to the Macintosh, and platforms like Unix, you realise the enormity of the problem facing anyone who wants to share documents with other computer users.
The proliferation of hardware and software is one of the reasons the computer revolution has not produced the promised paperless office.
That is about to change.
It will change because of a product that is about to hit the market called Adobe Acrobat, which, in my opinion, was the most significant product at Spring Comdex. Given that the other exhibits at the show included Microsoft's new operating system, Windows NT, and Digital's first PCs, including the world's fastest microprocessor, the Alpha (which we wrote about in Tuesday's Computer Age), that is a considerable statement.
Adobe Acrobat has been in development for several years but it will finally be released this month, at a price that had not been announced when I filed this story from Atlanta through CompuServe into the electronic typesetting system of `The Age'.
I filed the story in ASCII text, which is the only way documents can now be exchanged over the varying system architectures, operating systems and applications. When you convert something to ASCII, you lose all the formatting, all the fonts and graphics and, in most cases, much of the power of the original work.
If you exchange things like spreadsheets, ASCII text converts your figures into a meaningless pile of figures, which is why an astonishing 80 per cent of spreadsheets are sold. The owners of those packages don't prepare spreadsheets themselves but they need to buy one, simply to allow them to open somebody else's spreadsheets.
Even if a document has been prepared on the same variety of computer as your own, you will frequently be unable to see it in its original form because you don't own the application it was prepared in, or don't have the same range of fonts.
Adobe Acrobat creates a new type of cross-platform file format called PDF (Portable Document Format), based on Adobe's ubiquitous PostScript language, which is recognised by its reader software for the Macintosh, Windows, DOS and Unix platforms.
It allows users to send documents created on one computer to other computers electronically, regardless of hardware platform, operating system, application or fonts. The document can be read, annotated, printed and stored by the receiving computer, in its original form.
The program's tools also allow the recipient to navigate through files containing thousands of pages on screen, far more easily than with paper. You can even apply electronic equivalents of yellow Post-It notes to them.
You can fix ``live links" to documents, so that clicking on a name in an organisational chart could pop-up a biography, including a photograph.
Thumbnail views of the pages facilitate navigation through large documents, allowing you to quickly track down then zero in on the text or graphic you want. Corporate telephone books will never be the same with Acrobat because, using that feature, you can reproduce telephone numbers based not just on names but also positions within a building.
All this means that many and, perhaps, even most documents won't have to be printed or photocopied, filed and archived in future. Readers can however print out whatever pages they need on their own printers.
If you have shares in paper companies, I suggest that now might be a good time to sell them, and perhaps replace them with those of Adobe Systems Inc, of Mountain View, California. We will be looking at Acrobat in detail in a future column.
ANOTHER new product that Windows users will welcome is Fantastic Recall, from a new software company called Binar Graphics Inc.
Essentially, it brings the immediate access of Toshiba's AutoResume feature for laptops, to the desktop. It takes a snapshot of your screen and writes it to the hard disk, allowing you to return immediately to where you were when you left Windows, rather than having to wait for all the programs to load up again. At an introductory price of $US49.95, it looks highly promising. Binar Graphics can be contacted at fax 0011 1 415 491 1164. The phone number is 415 491 4182.
The company is also releasing Any View, a set of VGA display control utilities. It allows you to adjust image size, clarity and sharpness, magnify details, adjust dot pitch, expand the size of your desktop and adjust on-screen colours to optimise the environment for the particular application you are working in, from within that application.
Its Virtual Desktop utility enlarges your workspace beyond your screen boundaries, up to three times the standard 640x480.
With Syzard display calibrator, you can adjust your screen image to exact measurements, so that for the first time, Windows will provide actual ``what you see is what you get".
© 1993 The Age