SPECTRUM 2001 CONFERENCE NOTES

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Keynote Speaker

Grey Knowlton
Product Marketing Manager for Cross-Media Publishing
Adobe Systems, Inc.

Adobe's Vision of Professional Publishing

In the 1980's Adobe and the industry focused on desktop publishing, and in the 1990's the focus was on web publishing. To day and in the future, Adobe's focus is on networked publishing. One of the fundamental aspects of networked publishing is the valuation of digital assets. "Assets" have value, but "smarter assets" have greater value. If you ask yourself, "what is your server worth?" the value isn't the cost of the computer itself, but the value of the images, documents, and so forth that are locked up in digital form. The value of assets can be increased by:

• Separating form from content
• Repurposing vs. transformation
• Enriching the assets with rights management information.

These "smart assets" are flexible and have meaningful metadata. In the early years of digital produc-tion we had a "print first" workflow where the workflow emulated paste-up. This way of thinking and managing documents is not compatible with other types of publishing that do not have "pages." The natural extension was to move to cross-media publishing, but this represents just patched fixes to a bigger problem. The natural extension is network publishing.

The foundation of network publishing is the "smart document" which can be rendered for whatever media is needed. Smart documents need neutral standards and formats such as PDF, SVG, and XML, and require standards such as PRISM that allow content owners to direct the usage, security, and other right management aspects of using the "smart document."

Grey cautioned the audience to beware: it's a business process. Technologically imposed workflows of many software applications have transformation limitations, tend to dumb down documents, and forces users to use the business process that the vendor supports or versions that they've wired into their system. Open standards such as XML are necessary to open up the business process to the user. Users should also establish a business requirement including fixed targets for the use of valued assets and what open standards they will support.

Adobe's role, in Grey's opinion, is that PDF will become the carrier for XML. They are offering new standards such as XMP (eXtensible Metadata Platform). XMP is built on the W3C's RDF recommenda-tion. It allows you to build any XML Schema into PDF files in what Grey calls a "metadata platform." The license for the software developer kit that allows you to develop XMP is free. XMP supporters include:

Adobe Illustrator 10.0 will support XML-based dynamic graphic support, which can be used in per-sonalized digital printing. InDesign will support XML, SVG, PDF and OpenType. GoLive will include Smart Objects that maintain dynamic links to their source applications. These are some of the things that Adobe is doing to create networked publishing happen.

It was asked, how to extract or get to the XML in a PDF document? Grey said that there is a "Make-accessible" plugging for Acrobat will take a PDF file and create a tagged PDF file. There is another plugging available that will convert PDF to XML.

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